FWFusion: Fuzzy Whale Fusion model for MRI multimodal image fusion

Medical treatment and diagnosis require information that is taken from several modalities of images like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography and so on. The information obtained for certain ailments is often incomplete, invisible and lacking in consistent scanner performance. Hence, to overcome these issues in the image modalities, image fusion schemes are developed in the literature. This paper proposes a hybrid algorithm using fuzzy concept and a novel P-Whale algorithm, called Fuzzy Whale Fusion (FWFusion), for the fusion of MRI multimodal images. Two multimodal images from MRI (T1, T1C, T2 and FLAIR) are considered as the source images, which are fed as inputs to a wavelet transform. The transform utilized converts the images into four different bands, which are fused using two newly derived fusion factors, fuzzy fusion and whale fusion, in a weighted function. The proposed P-Whale approach combines Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for the effective selection of whale fusion factors. The performance of FWFusion model is compared to those of the existing strategies using Mutual Information (MI), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), as the evaluation metrics. From the mean performance evaluation, it is observed that the proposed approach can achieve MI of 1.714, RMSE of 1.9 and PSNR of 27.9472.