Complex Wavelet Based Speckle Reduction Using Multiple Ultrasound Images

摘要

Ultrasound imaging is a dominant tool for diagnosis and evaluation in medical imaging systems. However, as its major limitation is that the images it produces suffer from low quality due to the presence of speckle noise, to provide better clinical diagnoses, reducing this noise is essential. The key purpose of a speckle reduction algorithm is to obtain a speckle-free high-quality image whilst preserving important anatomical features, such as sharp edges. As this can be better achieved using multiple ultrasound images rather than a single image, we introduce a complex wavelet-based algorithm for the speckle reduction and sharp edge preservation of two-dimensional (2D) ultrasound images using multiple ultrasound images. The proposed algorithm does not rely on straightforward averaging of multiple images but, rather, in each scale, overlapped wavelet detail coefficients are weighted using dynamic threshold values and then reconstructed by averaging. Validation of the proposed algorithm is carried out using simulated and real images with synthetic speckle noise and phantom data consisting of multiple ultrasound images, with the experimental results demonstrating that speckle noise is significantly reduced whilst sharp edges without discernible distortions are preserved. The proposed approach performs better both qualitatively and quantitatively than previous existing approaches.