An Efficient Filtering Approach for Speckle Reduction in Ultrasound Images
Sumit Kushwaha
Electronics Engineering Department, Kamla Nehru Institute of Technology, Sultanpur, India.
Corresponding Author E-mail: sumit.kushwaha1@gmail.com
Abstract: Ultrasound (US) imaging is a valuable imaging technique for clinical diagnosis. It is non-invasive in nature and imaging the internal structure of the body to identify the probabilistic diseases or, abnormalities in tissues behavior. However, inherent response of speckle noise in US images limit the fine and edge details which affect the contrast resolution. This makes clinical diagnosis more difficult.In this paper, we proposed a non-linear anisotropic diffusion filtering for speckle reduction approach based on non-linear progression partial differential equation (PDE). For analysis purpose, we have considered the set of eight-real clinical B-Mode US images of human liver from different patient. These real US images are used for quantitative analysis. We compare the performance of four speckle reduction filters as Perona-Malik Filter, LEE Filter, FROST Filter, ADMBSS Filter with our proposed filter in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) value performance index under various noise variance selection Parmenter. Finally, we see that our proposed approach preserves the clinical details in US images and minimizing the noise level. Results for set of eight US images shows that our proposed filtering approach is more efficient for speckle noise reduction in comparison to other discussed filters in term of higher PSNR value (dB).
Keywords: Diffusion filter; MATLAB;PDE; PSNR;Ultrasound; Back to TOC