An Improved Hybrid Network With a Transformer Module for Medical Image Fusion

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2023 Jul;27(7):3489-3500. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2023.3264819. Epub 2023 Jun 30.

Abstract

Medical image fusion technology is an essential component of computer-aided diagnosis, which aims to extract useful cross-modality cues from raw signals to generate high-quality fused images. Many advanced methods focus on designing fusion rules, but there is still room for improvement in cross-modal information extraction. To this end, we propose a novel encoder-decoder architecture with three technical novelties. First, we divide the medical images into two attributes, namely pixel intensity distribution attributes and texture attributes, and thus design two self-reconstruction tasks to mine as many specific features as possible. Second, we propose a hybrid network combining a CNN and a transformer module to model both long-range and short-range dependencies. Moreover, we construct a self-adaptive weight fusion rule that automatically measures salient features. Extensive experiments on a public medical image dataset and other multimodal datasets show that the proposed method achieves satisfactory performance.

MeSH terms

  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted*
  • Electric Power Supplies*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Information Storage and Retrieval