Multi-Modal Medical Image Fusion Using 3-Stage Multiscale Decomposition and PCNN with Adaptive Arguments

In the current era of technological development, medical imaging plays an important role in many applications of medical diagnosis and therapy. In this regard, medical image fusion could be a powerful tool to combine multi-modal images by using image processing techniques. But, conventional approaches failed to provide the effective image quality assessments and robustness of fused image. To overcome these drawbacks, in this work three-stage multiscale decomposition (TSMSD) using pulse-coupled neural networks with adaptive arguments (PCNN-AA) approach is proposed for multi-modal medical image fusion. Initially, nonsubsampled shearlet transform (NSST) is applied onto the source images to decompose them into low frequency and high frequency bands. Then, low frequency bands of both the source images are fused using nonlinear anisotropic filtering with discrete Karhunen–Loeve transform (NLAF-DKLT) methodology. Next, high frequency bands obtained from NSST are fused using PCNN-AA approach. Now, fused low frequency and high frequency bands are reconstructed using NSST reconstruction. Finally, band fusion rule algorithm with pyramid reconstruction is applied to get final fused medical image. Extensive simulation outcome discloses the superiority of proposed TSMSD using PCNN-AA approach as compared to state-of-the-art medical image fusion methods in terms of fusion quality metrics such as entropy (E), mutual information (MI), mean (M), standard deviation (STD), correlation coefficient (CC) and computational complexity.

Thermodynamic Origin of Differential Excipient-Lysozyme Interactions

Understanding the intricate interplay of interactions between proteins, excipients, ions and water is important to achieve the effective purification and stable formulation of protein therapeutics. The free energy of lysozyme interacting with two kinds of polyanionic excipients, citrate and tripolyphosphate, together with sodium chloride and TRIS-buffer, are analysed in multiple-walker metadynamics simulations to understand why tripolyphosphate causes lysozyme to precipitate but citrate does not. The resulting multiscale decomposition of energy and entropy components for water, sodium chloride, excipients and lysozyme reveals that lysozyme is more stabilised by the interaction of tripolyphosphate with basic residues. This is accompanied by more sodium ions being released into solution from tripolyphosphate than for citrate, whilst the latter instead has more water molecules released into solution. Even though lysozyme aggregation is not directly probed in this study, these different mechanisms are suspected to drive the cross-linking between lysozyme molecules with vacant basic residues, ultimately leading to precipitation.

Multiscale Decomposition Prediction of Propagation Loss in Oceanic Tropospheric Ducts

The oceanic tropospheric duct is a structure with an abnormal atmospheric refractive index. This structure severely affects the remote sensing detection capability of electromagnetic systems designed for an environment with normal atmospheric refraction. The propagation loss of electromagnetic waves in the oceanic duct is an important concept in oceanic duct research. Owing to the long-term stability and short-term irregular changes in marine environmental parameters, the propagation loss in oceanic ducts has nonstationary and multiscale time characteristics. In this paper, we propose a multiscale decomposition prediction method for predicting the propagation loss in oceanic tropospheric ducts. The prediction performance was verified by simulating propagation loss data with noise. Using different evaluation criteria, the experimental results indicated that the proposed method outperforms six other comparison methods. Under noisy conditions, ensemble empirical mode decomposition effectively disassembles the original propagation loss into a limited number of stable sequences with different scale characteristics. Accordingly, predictive modeling was conducted based on multiscale propagation loss characteristic sequences. Finally, we reconstructed the predicted result to obtain the predicted value of the propagation loss in the oceanic duct. Additionally, a genetic algorithm was used to improve the generalization ability of the proposed method while avoiding the nonlinear predictor from falling into a local optimum.

Infrared and visible image fusion via octave Gaussian pyramid framework

Image fusion integrates information from multiple images (of the same scene) to generate a (more informative) composite image suitable for human and computer vision perception. The method based on multiscale decomposition is one of the commonly fusion methods. In this study, a new fusion framework based on the octave Gaussian pyramid principle is proposed. In comparison with conventional multiscale decomposition, the proposed octave Gaussian pyramid framework retrieves more information by decomposing an image into two scale spaces (octave and interval spaces). Different from traditional multiscale decomposition with one set of detail and base layers, the proposed method decomposes an image into multiple sets of detail and base layers, and it efficiently retains high- and low-frequency information from the original image. The qualitative and quantitative comparison with five existing methods (on publicly available image databases) demonstrate that the proposed method has better visual effects and scores the highest in objective evaluation.