Fusion of medical images using Nabla operator; Objective evaluations and step-by-step statistical comparisons.

Abstract

Since vectors include direction and magnitude, they have more information than scalars. So, converting the scalar images into the vector field leads achieving much information about the images that have been hidden in the spatial domain. In this paper, the proposed method fuses images after transforming the scalar field of images to a vector one. To transform the field, it uses Nabla operator. After that, the inverse transform is implemented to reconstruct the fused medical image. To show the performance of the proposed method and to evaluate it, different experiments and statistical comparisons were accomplished. Comparing the experimental results with the previous works, shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.