Imaging data fusion is becoming a bottleneck in clinical applications and translational research in medical imaging. This study aims to incorporate a novel multimodality medical image fusion technique into the shearlet domain. The proposed method uses the non-subsampled shearlet transform (NSST) to extract both low- and high-frequency image components. A novel approach is proposed for fusing low-frequency components using a modified sum-modified Laplacian (MSML)-based clustered dictionary learning technique. In the NSST domain, directed contrast can be used to fuse high-frequency coefficients. Using the inverse NSST method, a multimodal medical image is obtained. Compared to state-of-the-art fusion techniques, the proposed method provides superior edge preservation. According to performance metrics, the proposed method is shown to be approximately 10% better than existing methods in terms of standard deviation, mutual information, etc. Additionally, the proposed method produces excellent visual results regarding edge preservation, texture preservation, and more information.
Keywords: bioelectronics; clustered dictionary learning; medical imaging; shearlet domain; sum-modified Laplacian.