Author Affiliations
Abstract
1 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai 200030
2 Department of Ultrasound Imaging, Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital, Shanghai 200233
A method has been developed in this paper to gain effective speckle reduction in medical ultrasound images. To exploit full knowledge of the speckle distribution, here maximum likelihood was used to estimate speckle parameters corresponding to its statistical mode. Then the results were incorporated into the nonlinear anisotropic diffusion to achieve adaptive speckle reduction. Verified with simulated and ultrasound images, we show that this algorithm is capable of enhancing features of clinical interest and reduces speckle noise more efficiently than just applying classical filters. To avoid edge contribution, changes of contrast-to-noise ratio of different regions are also compared to investigate the performance of this approach.
100.0100 image processing 110.4280 noise in imaging systems 100.2980 image enhancement Chinese Optics Letters
2004, 2(1): 0124