A Modified Method for Speckle Noise Removal in Ultrasound Medical Images

Abstract

Ultrasound images contain speckle noise which degrades the quality of the images. Eliminating such noise is an important preprocessing task. This paper describes and analyses an algorithm for cleaning speckle noise in ultrasound medical images. Mathematical Morphological operations are used in this algorithm. This algorithm is based on Morphological Image Cleaning algorithm (MIC) designed by Richard Alan Peters II. The algorithm uses a different technique for reconstructing the features that are lost while removing the noise. For morphological operations it also uses arbitrary structuring elements suitable for the ultrasound images which have speckle noise.

Medical Image Denoising Using Bilateral Filter

“…Medical imaging includes magnetic resonance imaging, x-ray imaging, computer tomography, ultrasound imaging etc .All these images are collected by different types of sensors and they are contaminated by different types of noises [1,2] such as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) [3], speckle noise [4][5][6][7][8][9] , salt and pepper noise [10], rician noise [11], Brownian noise etc. Generally MRI images are corrupted by rician noise while ultrasound images are corrupted by speckle noise.…”

“…Amplifier noise and quantization noise occur during the conversion of number of electrons to pixel intensities. Ultrasound imaging is the example of coherent imaging and they are severely affected by speckle noise [7,8]. Speckle is a type of multiplicative noise.…”

“…This phenomenon is called propagation of noise (PoN) [13]. Now a days ultrasound imaging is used widely in medical imaging because it is portable, relatively inexpensive and comparatively safe with other medical imaging techniques such as MRI and CT scan [5][6][7][8][9]. It is used to visualize muscles, their size, shape, injuries and soft tissues of the internal organs viz.…”

“…liver, kidney, uterus, heart etc. Ultrasound images are severely affected by speckle noise [7,8]. Unlike additive white Gaussian noise speckle noise is a type of multiplicative noise [21] which satisfies the condition:…”

An Extensive Review of Significant Researches on Medical Image Denoising Techniques

“…In ultrasound medical images, an algorithm has been proposed and analyzed by Ratha Jeyalakshmi et al [56] for cleaning speckle noise. In this algorithm, Mathematical Morphological operations were utilized.…”