An Attention-based Multi-Scale Feature Learning Network for Multimodal Medical Image Fusion
This work addresses the problem of synthesizing complementary information from medical images for radiologists, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing fusion techniques.
The paper tackles multimodal medical image fusion by introducing a Dilated Residual Attention Network and a Softmax-based weighted fusion strategy, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four fusion metrics.
Medical images play an important role in clinical applications. Multimodal medical images could provide rich information about patients for physicians to diagnose. The image fusion technique is able to synthesize complementary information from multimodal images into a single image. This technique will prevent radiologists switch back and forth between different images and save lots of time in the diagnostic process. In this paper, we introduce a novel Dilated Residual Attention Network for the medical image fusion task. Our network is capable to extract multi-scale deep semantic features. Furthermore, we propose a novel fixed fusion strategy termed Softmax-based weighted strategy based on the Softmax weights and matrix nuclear norm. Extensive experiments show our proposed network and fusion strategy exceed the state-of-the-art performance compared with reference image fusion methods on four commonly used fusion metrics.