ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with a relatively new direction in image processing that proves to be of high importance in many areas, not just in medical applications — obtaining qualitatively new information by combining the image data from several different images (or sequences of images). The term

image fusion

is used here in a very generic sense of synthesizing the new information based on combining and mutually complementing the information from more than a single image. Although we are dealing largely with two-dimensional images in this book, it should be understood that medical image fusion often concerns three-dimensional image data provided by tomographic modalities. However, the three-dimensional fusion is, disregarding rare exceptions, a conceptually simple generalization of the twodimensional case.