The influence of speckle suppression on perceived ultrasound image quality

In this paper we focus on the diagnostic relevance of ultrasound (US) speckle suppression by means of advanced image (post)processing. As US speckle (noise) is often the main obstacle for an objective qualitative diagnosis different ways of denoising the US image while preserving the relevant clinical features have been proposed. Despite that speckle suppression has already been proven successful for many quantitative tasks such as, e.g., segmentation and registration, it remains to be shown that the processed images are perceived as of a better diagnostic quality by the medical experts. Here we present the results of a psycho-visual experiment investigating exactly that.