Speckle Noise Reduction in Medical Ultrasound Images

Ultrasound imaging is an incontestable vital tool for diagnosis, it provides in non-invasive manner the internal structure of the body to detect eventually diseases or abnormalities tissues. Unfortunately, the presence of speckle noise in these images affects edges and fine details which limit the contrast resolution and make diagnostic more difficult. In this paper, we propose a denoising approach which combines logarithmic transformation and a non linear diffusion tensor. Since speckle noise is multiplicative and nonwhite process, the logarithmic transformation is a reasonable choice to convert signaldependent or pure multiplicative noise to an additive one. The key idea from using diffusion tensor is to adapt the flow diffusion towards the local orientation by applying anisotropic diffusion along the coherent structure direction of interesting features in the image. To illustrate the effective performance of our algorithm, we present some experimental results on synthetically and real echographic images

A Tutorial on Speckle Reduction in Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

Speckle is a granular disturbance, usually modeled as a multiplicative noise, that affects synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, as well as all coherent images. Over the last three decades, several methods have been proposed for the reduction of speckle, or despeckling, in SAR images. Goal of this paper is making a comprehensive review of despeckling methods since their birth, over thirty years ago, highlighting trends and changing approaches over years. The concept of fully developed speckle is explained. Drawbacks of homomorphic filtering are pointed out. Assets of multiresolution despeckling, as opposite to spatial-domain despeckling, are highlighted. Also advantages of undecimated, or stationary, wavelet transforms over decimated ones are discussed. Bayesian estimators and probability density function (pdf) models in both spatial and multiresolution domains are reviewed. Scale-space varying pdf models, as opposite to scale varying models, are promoted. Promising methods following non-Bayesian approaches, like nonlocal (NL) filtering and total variation (TV) regularization, are reviewed and compared to spatial- and wavelet-domain Bayesian filters. Both established and new trends for assessment of despeckling are presented. A few experiments on simulated data and real COSMO-SkyMed SAR images highlight, on one side the costperformance tradeoff of the different methods, on the other side the effectiveness of solutions purposely designed for SAR heterogeneity and not fully developed speckle. Eventually, upcoming methods based on new concepts of signal processing, like compressive sensing, are foreseen as a new generation of despeckling, after spatial-domain and multiresolution-domain method

Multiplicative Multiresolution Decomposition for Lossless Volumetric Medical Images Compression

With the emergence of medical imaging, the compression of volumetric medical images is essential. For this purpose, we propose a novel Multiplicative Multiresolution Decomposition (MMD) wavelet coding scheme for lossless compression of volumetric medical images. The MMD is used in speckle reduction technique but offers some proprieties which can be exploited in compression. Thus, as the wavelet transform the MMD provides a hierarchical representation and offers a possibility to realize lossless compression. We integrate in proposed scheme an inter slice filter based on wavelet transform and motion compensation to reduce data energy efficiently. We compare lossless results of classical wavelet coders such as 3D SPIHT and JP3D to the proposed scheme. This scheme incorporates MMD in lossless compression technique by applying MMD/wavelet or MMD transform to each slice, after inter slice filter is employed and the resulting sub-bands are coded by the 3D zero-tree algorithm SPIHT. Lossless experimental results show that the proposed scheme with the MMD can achieve lowest bit rates compared to 3D SPIHT and JP3D

Speckle Suppression in Ultrasonic Images Based on Undecimated Wavelets

An original method to denoise ultrasonic images affected by speckle is presented. Speckle is modeled as a signal-dependent noise corrupting the image. Noise reduction is approached as a Wiener-like filtering performed in a shift-invariant wavelet domain by means of an adaptive rescaling of the coefficients of an undecimated octave decomposition. The scaling factor of each coefficient is calculated from local statistics of the degraded image, the parameters of the noise model, and the wavelet filters. Experimental results demonstrate that excellent background smoothing as well as preservation of edge sharpness and fine details can be obtained

A Low-Complexity Bayesian Estimation Scheme for Speckle Suppression in Images

Speckle noise reduction is a crucial pre-processing step for a successful interpretation of images corrupted by speckle noise, and thus, it has drawn a great deal of attention of researchers in the image processing community. The Bayesian estimation is a powerful signal estimation technique and has been widely used for speckle noise removal in images. In the Bayesian estimation based despeckling techniques, the choice of suitable signal and noise models and the development of a shrinkage function for estimation of the signal are the major concerns from the standpoint of the accuracy and computational complexity of the estimation. In this thesis, a low-complexity wavelet-based Bayesian estimation technique for despeckling of images is developed. The main idea of the proposed technique is in establishing suitable statistical models for the wavelet coefficients of additively decomposed components, namely, the reflectance image and the signal-dependant noise, of the multiplicative degradation model of the noisy image and then in using these two statistical models to develop a shrinkage function with a low-complexity realization for the estimation of the wavelet coefficients of the noise-free image. A study is undertaken to explore the effectiveness of using a two sided exponential distribution as a prior statistical model for the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients of the signal-dependant noise. This model, along with the Cauchy distribution, which is known to be a good model for the wavelet coefficients of the reflectance image, is used to develop a minimum mean square error (MMSE) Bayesian estimator for the DWT coefficients of the noise-free image. A low-cost realization of the shrinkage function resulting from the MMSE Bayesian estimation is proposed and its efficacy is verified from the standpoint of accuracy as well as computational cost. The performance of the proposed despeckling scheme is evaluated on both synthetic and real SAR images in terms of the commonly used metrics, and the results are compared to that of some other state-of-the-art despeckling schemes available in the literature. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed despeckling scheme in providing a significant reduction in the speckle noise at a very low computational cost and simultaneously in preserving the image details

Advancements and Breakthroughs in Ultrasound Imaging

Ultrasonic imaging is a powerful diagnostic tool available to medical practitioners, engineers and researchers today. Due to the relative safety, and the non-invasive nature, ultrasonic imaging has become one of the most rapidly advancing technologies. These rapid advances are directly related to the parallel advancements in electronics, computing, and transducer technology together with sophisticated signal processing techniques. This book focuses on state of the art developments in ultrasonic imaging applications and underlying technologies presented by leading practitioners and researchers from many parts of the world

Hybrid Region-based Image Compression Scheme for Mamograms and Ultrasound Images

The need for transmission and archive of mammograms and ultrasound Images has dramatically increased in tele-healthcare applications. Such images require large amount of' storage space which affect transmission speed. Therefore an effective compression scheme is essential. Compression of these images. in general. laces a great challenge to compromise between the higher compression ratio and the relevant diagnostic information. Out of the many studied compression schemes. lossless . IPl. (i- LS and lossy SPII IT are found to he the most efficient ones. JPEG-LS and SI'll IT are chosen based on a comprehensive experimental study carried on a large number of mammograms and ultrasound images of different sizes and texture. The lossless schemes are evaluated based on the compression ratio and compression speed. The distortion in the image quality which is introduced by lossy methods evaluated based on objective criteria using Mean Square Error (MSE) and Peak signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). It is found that lossless compression can achieve a modest compression ratio 2: 1 - 4: 1. bossy compression schemes can achieve higher compression ratios than lossless ones but at the price of the image quality which may impede diagnostic conclusions. In this work, a new compression approach called Ilvbrid Region-based Image Compression Scheme (IIYRICS) has been proposed for the mammograms and ultrasound images to achieve higher compression ratios without compromising the diagnostic quality. In I LYRICS, a modification for JPI; G-LS is introduced to encode the arbitrary shaped disease affected regions. Then Shape adaptive SPIT IT is applied on the remaining non region of interest. The results clearly show that this hybrid strategy can yield high compression ratios with perfect reconstruction of diagnostic relevant regions, achieving high speed transmission and less storage requirement. For the sample images considered in our experiment, the compression ratio increases approximately ten times. However, this increase depends upon the size of the region of interest chosen. It is also föund that the pre-processing (contrast stretching) of region of interest improves compression ratios on mammograms but not on ultrasound images

LV Volume Quantification via Spatiotemporal Analysis of Real-Time 3-D Echocardiography

This paper presents a method of four-dimensional (4-D) (3-D+Time) space-frequency analysis for directional denoising and enhancement of real-time three-dimensional (RT3D) ultrasound and quantitative measures in diagnostic cardiac ultrasound. Expansion of echocardiographic volumes is performed with complex exponential wavelet-like basis functions called brushlets. These functions offer good localization in time and frequency and decompose a signal into distinct patterns of oriented harmonics, which are invariant to intensity and contrast range. Deformable-model segmentation is carried out on denoised data after thresholding of transform coefficients. This process attenuates speckle noise while preserving cardiac structure location. The superiority of 4-D over 3-D analysis for decorrelating additive white noise and multiplicative speckle noise on a 4-D phantom volume expanding in time is demonstrated. Quantitative validation, computed for contours and volumes, is performed on in vitro balloon phantoms. Clinical applications of this spatiotemporal analysis tool are reported for six patient cases providing measures of left ventricular volumes and ejection fraction