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http://dx.doi.org/10.9718/JBER.2016.37.4.140

Evaluation on the Usefulness of Ultrasound Image Speckle Reduction Using Total Variation Denoising (TVD) Method in Laplacian Pyramid  

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)
Publication Information
Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research / v.37, no.4, 2016 , pp. 140-146 More about this Journal
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.
Keywords
Laplacian pyramid; Total variation denoising (TVD); Speckle reduction; Ultrasound imaging;
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Times Cited By KSCI : 1  (Citation Analysis)
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