Techniques for fusion of multimodal images: Application to breast imaging

In many situations it is desirable and advantageous to acquire medical images in more than one modality. For example positron emission tomography can be used to acquire functional data while magnetic resonance imaging can be used to acquire morphological data. In some situations a side by side comparison of the images provides enough information, but in other situations it may be considered a necessity to have the exact spatial relationship between the modalities presented to the observer. In order to accomplish this, the images need to first be registered and then combined (fused) to create a single image. In this paper we discuss the options for performing such fusion in the context of multimodal breast imaging.