Speckle reduction in echocardiography by temporal compounding and anisotropic diffusion filtering

Echocardiography is a medical imaging technique based on ultrasound signals that is used to evaluate heart anatomy and physiology. Echocardiographic images are affected by speckle, a type of multiplicative noise that obscures details of the structures, and reduces the overall image quality. This paper shows an approach to enhance echocardiography using two processing techniques: temporal compounding and anisotropic diffusion filtering. We used twenty echocardiographic videos that include one or three cardiac cycles to test the algorithms. Two images from each cycle were aligned in space and averaged to obtain the compound images. These images were then processed using anisotropic diffusion filters to further improve their quality. Resultant images were evaluated using quality metrics and visual assessment by two medical doctors. The average total improvement on signal-to-noise ratio was up to 100.29% for videos with three cycles, and up to 32.57% for videos with one cycle. © 2015 SPIE.

• Fecha de publicación: 2015
• Institución: Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar
• Repositorio: Repositorio Institucional UTB
• Idioma: eng
• OAI Identifier: oai:repositorio.utb.edu.co:20.500.12585/9027
• Acceso en línea: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12585/9027
• Palabra clave: Diffusion filtering; Echocardiography; Temporal compounding; Anisotropy; Bioinformatics; Diffusion; Echocardiography; Imaging techniques; Information science; Optical anisotropy; Quality control; Signal to noise ratio; Speckle; Ultrasonic applications; Anisotropic diffusion filtering; Anisotropic diffusion filters; Diffusion filtering; Echocardiographic images; Multiplicative noise; Processing technique; Ultrasound signal; Visual assessments; Medical imaging
• Rights: restrictedAccess
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/