A Novel Framework of Speckle Reducing Scan Conversion in Ultrasound Imaging Systems

ABSTRACT The resolutions and speckle noise in ultrasound imaging systems are the dominant issues which reduce the efficiency of the system. In conventional speckle reduction techniques, speckle filters are applied either on the scan data in pre-processing stage before scan conversion or on the scan-converted image as post-processing operation. It is observed that the output image quality is better if filtering is applied in the pre-processing stage, but it increases computational load since the amount of data to be handled is larger. Furthermore, after filtering the noise from the data, interpolation is performed for scan conversion. All popular existing speckle reduction filters can be adopted in either of these frameworks. In this article, a new framework is proposed for speckle reduction, where scan conversion and speckle reduction are performed simultaneously. This novel framework reduces the overall computation of the ultrasound imaging system which makes it suitable for real-time applications. Several speckle reduction algorithms can be adopted by this new framework. The performance of the new paradigm is compared with existing frameworks by applying some prevalent filters. The quantitative and qualitative results confirm the superiority of the proposed framework with respect to existing candidates.