Information fusion in the realm of medical applications - A bibliographic glimpse at its growing appeal

As readers of this journal are well aware, Information Fusion has impacted many diverse application areas beyond the traditional aerospace and defense that have long constituted the majority of our offerings. Over the a-little-more-than-decade of its existence, the journal has published many special issues and sections covering these diverse areas. One of the earliest special sections of the Journal [Information Fusion 3 (2) (2002)] was on medical applications. Since then the role of information fusion in this application area has become significantly more noticeable especially in medical journals. It is indeed gratifying to note that information fusion tools have begun to impact the population at large at an individual or personal level in terms of improving the quality of medical diagnostics and curative process and thereby the resultant health care. This editorial is being penned to highlight this growing appeal of information fusion within the medical community by offering a representative bibliography of over 300 relevant publications in the literature spanning nearly two decades. (The bibliography does not include health information management type of studies, which perhaps deserves a separate coverage; indeed a special issue on this facet is in the works.) An in-depth critical review of these publications was deemed beyond the scope of this editorial. We would of course welcome, for publication consideration, such a comprehensive review covering the entire field without being necessarily limited to the representative bibliography presented here. Scanning the bibliography [1–322], it becomes obvious that the majority of studies involving information fusion in the medical arena resort to fusion at the image level. These span a diverse array of imaging sensors specific to medical imaging, such as X-ray Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Positron-Emission-Tomography (PET), Single Photon Emission Computed tomography (SPECT), Ultra-Sound (US) and many variants thereof. There are indeed a fair number of studies, which evoke fusion at higher levels, such as feature level fusion (for example [85,164,192,200,231,282,292,305]), classifier fusion (for example [123,132,135,139,149,214]) and the like. Most common application for these tools is in the area of medical diagnostics. However, there are many instances where fusion plays a role in the treatment planning (for example [18,21,26,29, 79,91,94,106, 188,207, 213,236,237,276,287,313]) and curative phases, such as for example, computer-(vision) guided/assisted surgical procedures [37,38,159,203,265]. Another topic, which is related to the subject matter of this editorial only in a tangential manner, is