Enhancement of Despeckled Ultrasound Images by Forward-Backward Diffusion

The forward-backward diffusion (FBD) by itself does not remove speckles from the ultrasound (US) images. However, it can effectively improve results of methods intended for speckle removal. In this paper improvement of the results coming from the nonlinear coherent diffusion (NCD) is considered. The NCD-processed image still contains excessive amount of detail that cannot be attributed to the human tissues. The paper describes the details of the FBD approach and presents examples of the obtained results. Changes made to images by the FBD are quantitatively analyzed by considering statistical moments, textural measures, and image quality measures. It is shown that the FBD simplifies the image and improves visibility of the most important structures in the image.