Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research (대한의용생체공학회:의공학회지)

The Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering (대한의용생체공학회)
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Evaluation on the Usefulness of Ultrasound Image Speckle Reduction Using Total Variation Denoising (TVD) Method in Laplacian Pyramid

라플라시안 피라미드 기반 총변동 잡음제거 기법을 이용한 초음파 영상 스펙클 제거 유용성 평가

  • Moon, J.H. (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Konyang University) ;
  • Choi, D.H. (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Konyang University) ;
  • Lee, S.Y. (Advanced Medical Technology Laboratory, Healcerion Co.) ;
  • Tae, Ki-Sik (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Konyang University)
  • 문주혜 (건양대학교 의공학부) ;
  • 최동혁 (건양대학교 의공학부) ;
  • 이수열 ((주)힐세리온 첨단의료기기 연구소) ;
  • 태기식 (건양대학교 의공학부)
  • Received : 2016.07.19
  • Accepted : 2016.08.02
  • Published : 2016.08.31
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Abstract

The ultrasound imaging in medical diagnosis has become a popular modality because of its safe, noninvasive, portable, relatively inexpensive, and provides a real-time image formation. However, usefulness of ultrasound imaging is at times limited due to the presence of signal-dependent noise like as speckle. Therefore, noise reduction is very important, as various types of noise generated limits the effectiveness of medical image diagnosis. This paper introduces a speckle noise reduce algorithm using total variation denoising (TVD) in Laplacian pyramid. With this method, speckle is removed by TVD of bandpass ultrasound images in Laplacian pyramid domain. For TVD in each pyramid layer, a ${\lambda}$ is selected by trial-and-error method. The visual comparison of despeckled 'in vivo' ultrasound images from pancreas shows that the proposed method could effectively preserve edges and detailed structures while thoroughly suppressing speckle. For a Simulated B-mode image, contrast-to-noise-ratio (CNR) and signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) were obtained like 4.65 dB and 14.11 dB, respectively. The results show that the proposed method can conduct better than some of the existing methods in terms of the CNR and the SNR.

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References

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