Empowering ultrasound image filtering precision by reducing speckles and preserving edge cues

Abstract

Ultrasound speckle is an interference pattern that reduces the quality of medical ultrasound images and decreases the capability of interpreting the medical information included in these images. Therefore, speckle suppression is vital whenever ultrasound imaging is used. In this research, an efficient adaptive ultrasound image filter is proposed to reduce ultrasound speckle while maintaining the edge cues in the image. In particular, the pixels that correspond to tissue boundaries are identified by computing the edge map of ultrasound image, and the noisy pixels are determined by calculating the image radiation. The proposed filtering method is designed to adaptively apply different window sizes and bandwidths based on the edge map and image radiation. The proposed method is employed to process a set of ultrasound images and the filtering performance is assessed using a set of broadly accepted filtering metrics. These metrics aim to evaluate the filtering performance, including the capability of the filter to preserve the edges and maintain the image quality. The performance of the proposed filtering method is compared with eight existing image filtering methods. The experimental results indicated that the proposed filtering method enables effective edge preservation and retains image quality. These results suggest the potential of the proposed filtering method to achieve effective speckle suppression in ultrasound images.