Statistical Analysis of speckle noise reduction techniques for echocardiographic Images

Echocardiography is the safe, easy and fast technology for diagnosing the cardiac diseases. As in other ultrasound images these images also contain speckle noise. In some cases this speckle noise is useful such as in motion detection. But in general noise removal is required for better analysis of the image and proper diagnosis. Different Adaptive and anisotropic filters are included for statistical analysis. Statistical parameters such as Signal‐to‐Noise Ratio (SNR), Peak Signal‐to‐Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) calculated for performance measurement. One more important aspect that there may be blurring during speckle noise removal. So it is prefered that filter should be able to enhance edges during noise removal.

[1]  Yasser M. Kadah,et al.  Real-time speckle reduction and coherence enhancement in ultrasound imaging via nonlinear anisotropic diffusion , 2002, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[2]  Victor S. Frost,et al.  A Model for Radar Images and Its Application to Adaptive Digital Filtering of Multiplicative Noise , 1982, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[3]  Scott T. Acton,et al.  Speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion , 2002, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[4]  Kenneth E. Barner,et al.  Rayleigh-Maximum-Likelihood Filtering for Speckle Reduction of Ultrasound Images , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[5]  Alexander A. Sawchuk,et al.  Adaptive Noise Smoothing Filter for Images with Signal-Dependent Noise , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[6]  Andrew F. Laine,et al.  Speckle reduction and contrast enhancement of echocardiograms via multiscale nonlinear processing , 1998, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[7]  S. Leeman,et al.  Ultrasound speckle and equivalent scatterers. , 2005, Ultrasonics.

[8]  C. Westin,et al.  Sequential anisotropic Wiener filtering applied to 3D MRI data. , 2007, Magnetic resonance imaging.

[9]  Carl-Fredrik Westin,et al.  Oriented Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[10]  C. Burckhardt Speckle in ultrasound B-mode scans , 1978, IEEE Transactions on Sonics and Ultrasonics.

[11]  Fan Zhang,et al.  Multiscale Nonlinear Diffusion and Shock Filter for Ultrasound Image Enhancement , 2006, 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'06).

[12]  Alin Achim,et al.  Novel Bayesian multiscale method for speckle removal in medical ultrasound images , 2001, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[13]  J. Bamber,et al.  Quantitative effects of speckle reduction on cross sectional echocardiographic images. , 1989, British heart journal.

[14]  Jitendra Malik,et al.  Scale-Space and Edge Detection Using Anisotropic Diffusion , 1990, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..