Combination of Spatial Domain Filters for Speckle Noise Reduction in Ultrasound Medical Images

Abstract

The occurrence of speckle noise in medical Ultrasound (US) images poses a big challenge to medical practitioners over last several years. Speckle noise reduces the fine details present in the images and hence make it more difficult to diagnose. In this paper, a novel method based on the combination of three spatial domain filters is presented. The output of these filters is combined on the basis of an Intensity Classifier Map (ICF) formed using Coefficient of Dispersion (CoD) parameter. Experiments were conducted on synthetic and real US images. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the proposed method is carried out in comparison to other six existing methods. It has been found from the obtained results that proposed method delivers observable improvement in all quantitative parameters undertaken for synthetic US image and in MVR value for real US images. Also, the effectiveness of the proposed method is found to be consistent with qualitative assessment of the denoised images.