The invention discloses a Contourlet domain multi-modal medical image fusion method based on statistical modeling, mainly for solving the problems of difficulty in balancing spatial resolution and spectrum information during medical image fusion. The realization steps comprise: 1), performing IHS transformation on an image to be fused, and obtaining brightness, tone and saturation; 2), respectively executing Contourlet transformation on a brightness component, and estimating the CHMM parameters of a context hidden Markov model of a high frequency sub-band by use of an EM algorithm; 3), a low frequency sub-band employing a fusion rule of taking the maximum from area absolute value sums, and the high frequency sub-band designing a fusion rule based on a CHMM and an improved pulse coupling nerve network M-PCNN; 4), a high frequency coefficient and a low frequency coefficient after fusion executing Contourlet inverse transformation to reconstruct a new brightness component; and 5), obtaining a fusion image by use of IHS inverse transformation. The method provided by the invention can fully integrate the structure and function information of a medical image, effectively protects image details, improves the visual effect, and compared to a conventional fusion method, greatly improves the quality of a fusion image.