Fused Medical image of different modalities produces more explanatory image compared to the input images considered separately. This is useful for the medical practitioners for better treatment planning for the patient. In this paper we have experimented with various mathematical transforms to fuse Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance imaging (MRI) scans of lumber spine. CT images mainly depict more information related to bones of the scanned body part whereas MR images provide the details of soft tissues more clearly. CT and MR images have been aligned / registered with each other to achieve better fusion output. Ten cases have been considered for generating the image datasets for experiments. All the fused results are compared using four quantitative quality assessment parameters: entropy, standard deviation, fusion factor and fusion symmetry and also by qualitative way. Quantitative and qualitative assessment indicates that fused images generated by fast walsh hadamard transform carry symmetrically good amount of information from both images and of good contrast. These images can be used for better patient treatment planning by medical practitioners.

Medical image processing; image fusion, image transforms, CT, MR

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