Condensed anisotropic diffusion for speckle reducton and enhancement in ultrasonography

Abstract

This article proposes a technique for speckle reduction in medical ultrasound (US) imaging which preserves the point and linear features with the added advantage of energy condensation regulator. Whatever be the post processing task on US image, the image should undergo a preprocessing step called despeckling. Nowadays, though the US machines are available with built-in speckle reduction facility, they are suffered by many practical limitations such as limited dynamic range of the display, limited number of unique directions that an US beam scan follow to average an image and limited size of transducer, etc. The proposed diffusion model can be used as a visual enhancement tool for interpretation as well as a preprocessing task for further diagnosis. This method incorporates two terms: diffusion and regulator. The anisotropic diffusion preserves and enhances edges and local details. The regularization enables the correction of feature broadening distortion which is the common problem in second-order diffusion-based methods. In this scheme, the diffusion matrix is designed using local coordinate transformation and the feature broadening correction term is derived from energy function. Performance of the proposed method has been illustrated using synthetic and real US data. Experiments indicate better speckle reduction and effective preservation of edges and local details. © 2012 Shanmugam and RSD; licensee Springer.