Edge Detail Preservation Technique for Enhancing Speckle Reduction Filtering Performance in Medical Ultrasound Imaging

Abstract

Ultrasound imaging is a unique medical imaging modality due to its clinical versatility, manageable biological effects, and low cost. However, a significant limitation of ultrasound imaging is the noisy appearance of its images due to speckle noise, which reduces image quality and hence makes diagnosis more challenging. Consequently, this problem received interest from many research groups and many methods have been proposed for speckle suppression using various filtering techniques. The common problem with such methods is that they tend to distort the edge detail content within the image and blurring is commonly encountered. In this work, we propose a new method that could be combined with previous speckle suppression techniques to preserve edge detail content of the image. The original image is first processed to extract the edge detail content. Rather than presenting the original method to the speckle suppression filtering technique, the edge detail content is subtracted from the original image before it is filtered. Then, such edge detail content is added to the output of filtering to form the final image. The new method is practically verified using 26 imaging experiments as well as ultrasound images from publicly available databases in combination with four widely used speckle reduction filters. The results are evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively using standard image quality metrics.