Ultrasound image deconvolution in symmetrical mirror wavelet bases

Observed medical ultrasound images are degraded representations of true tissue images. The degradation is a combination of blurring due to the finite resolution of the imaging system and the observation noise. This paper presents a new wavelet based deconvolution method for medical ultrasound imaging. We design a new orthogonal wavelet basis known as the symmetrical mirror wavelet basis that can provide more desirable frequency resolution. Our proposed ultrasound image restoration with wavelets consists of an inversion of the observed ultrasound image using the estimated two-dimensional (2-D) point spread function (PSF) followed by denoising in the designed wavelet basis. The tissue image restoration is then accomplished by modelling the tissue structures with the generalized Gaussian density (GGD) function using the Bayesian estimation. Both subjective and objective measures show that the deconvolved images are more appealing in the visualization and resolution gain.

[1]  Bernard Rouge,et al.  Minimax solution of inverse problems and deconvolution by mirror wavelet thresholding , 1999, Optics & Photonics.

[2]  Edward H. Adelson,et al.  Noise removal via Bayesian wavelet coring , 1996, Proceedings of 3rd IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.

[3]  G. A Theory for Multiresolution Signal Decomposition : The Wavelet Representation , 2004 .

[4]  R. Jirik,et al.  Superresolution of ultrasound images using the first and second harmonic signal , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[5]  J A Jensen,et al.  Deconvolution of Ultrasound Images , 1992, Ultrasonic imaging.

[6]  Cishen Zhang,et al.  Constrained Least Squares Filtering for Ultrasound Image Deconvolution , 2005, 2005 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology 27th Annual Conference.

[7]  Martin Vetterli,et al.  Adaptive wavelet thresholding for image denoising and compression , 2000, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[8]  M. Srinivasan,et al.  Robust deconvolution of high-frequency ultrasound images using higher-order spectral analysis and wavelets , 2003, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.