• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.238-246
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• 2017

High frequency ultrasound imaging typically suffers from low sensitivity due to the small aperture of high frequency transducers and shallow imaging depth due to the frequency-dependent attenuation of ultrasound. These limitations should be overcome to obtain high-frequency, high- resolution ultrasound images. One practical solution to the problems is a high-performance signal receiver capable of detecting a very small signal and amplifying the signal with minimal electronic noise addition. This paper reports a recently developed low-noise, wideband ultrasound receiver for high-frequency, high-resolution ultrasound imaging. The developed receiver has an amplification gain of up to 73 dB and a variable amplification gain range of 48 dB over an operating frequency of 80 MHz. Also, it has an amplification gain flatness of ${\pm}1dB$. Due to these high performances, the developed receiver has a signal-to-noise ratio of at least 8.4 dB and a contrast-to-noise ratio of at least 3.7 dB higher than commercial receivers.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.159-168
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• 2015

This paper introduces effective noise removal method for medical ultrasound volume data. Ultrasound volume data need to be filtered because it has a lot of noise. Conventional 2d filtering methods ignore information of adjacent layers and conventional 3d filtering methods are slow or have simple filter that are not efficient for removing noise and also don't equally operate filtering because that don't take into account ultrasound' sampling character. To solve this problem, we introduce method that fast perform in parallel bilateral filtering that is known as good for noise removal and adjust proportionally window size depending on that's position. Experiments compare noise removal and loss of original data among average filtered or biliteral filtered or adaptive biliteral filtered ultrasound volume rendering images. In this way, we can more efficiently and correctly remove noise of ultrasound volume data.

• Journal of KSNVE
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.743-759
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• 2000

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.140-146
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• 2016

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.

• The Journal of the Society of Korean Medicine Diagnostics
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.37-44
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• 2016

Ultrasonic imaging is the most widely modality among modern imaging device for medical diagnosis. Nevertheless, medical ultrasound images suffer from speckle noise and low contrast. In this paper, we propose probabilistic edge map for ultrasound image edge enhancement using automatic alien algorithm. The proposed method used applied speckle reduced ultrasound imaging for edge improvement using sequentially acquired ultrasound imaging. To evaluate the performance of method, the similarity between the reference and edge enhanced image was measured by quantity analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed method considerably improves the image quality with region edge enhancement.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.74-82
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• 2008

The objective of this paper is to remove noises of image based on the heuristic noises filter and to extract a tumor region by using morphology techniques in breast ultrasound image. Similar objective studies have been conducted based on ultrasound image of high resolution. As a result, efficiency of noise removal is not fine enough for low resolution image. Moreover, when ultrasound image has multiple tumors, the extraction of ROI (Region Of Interest) is not accomplished or processed by a manual selection. In this paper, our method is done 4 kinds of process for noises removal and the extraction of ROI for solving problems of restrictive automated segmentation. First process is that pixel value is acquired as matrix type. Second process is a image preprocessing phase that is aimed to maximize a contrast of image and prevent a leak of personal information. In next process, the heuristic noise filter that is based on opinion of medical specialist is applied to remove noises. The last process is to extract a tumor region by using morphology techniques. As a result, the noise is effectively eliminated in all images and a extraction of tumor regions is possible though one ultrasound image has several tumors.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2018.05a
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• pp.510-512
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• 2018

The proposed method enhances the resolution of images by removing noise using wavelet transform to remove noise from images generated by ultrasound diagnosis. We propose an algorithm to reduce the speckle noise and enhance the edge of the ultrasound image. The proposed algorithm can enhance edges of various sizes by using wavelet transform which can use both frequency and spatial information. Experimental results show that the performance of the algorithm for noise reduction of ultrasound images is about 0.45ms for $520{\times}440$ images.

• Journal of Animal Science and Technology
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• v.65 no.2
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• pp.365-376
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• 2023

Pig breeding management directly contributes to the profitability of pig farms, and pregnancy diagnosis is an important factor in breeding management. Therefore, the need to diagnose pregnancy in sows is emphasized, and various studies have been conducted in this area. We propose a computer-aided diagnosis system to assist livestock farmers to diagnose sow pregnancy through ultrasound. Methods for diagnosing pregnancy in sows through ultrasound include the Doppler method, which measures the heart rate and pulse status, and the echo method, which diagnoses by amplitude depth technique. We propose a method that uses deep learning algorithms on ultrasonography, which is part of the echo method. As deep learning-based classification algorithms, Inception-v4, Xception, and EfficientNetV2 were used and compared to find the optimal algorithm for pregnancy diagnosis in sows. Gaussian and speckle noises were added to the ultrasound images according to the characteristics of the ultrasonography, which is easily affected by noise from the surrounding environments. Both the original and noise added ultrasound images of sows were tested together to determine the suitability of the proposed method on farms. The pregnancy diagnosis performance on the original ultrasound images achieved 0.99 in accuracy in the highest case and on the ultrasound images with noises, the performance achieved 0.98 in accuracy. The diagnosis performance achieved 0.96 in accuracy even when the intensity of noise was strong, proving its robustness against noise.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.535-538
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• 2009

Speckle noise reduction for ultrasound CT image using morphological adaptive median filtering based on edge preservation is presented in this paper. Speckle noise is multiplicative feature and causes ultrasound image to degrade widely from transducer. An input image is classified into edge region and homogeneous region in preprocessing. The speckle is reduced by morphological operation on the 2D gray scale by using convolution and correlation, and edges are preserved. The adaptive median is processed to reduce an impulse noise to preserve edges. As the result, MAM of the proposed method enhances the image to about 10% in comparison with Winner filter by Edge Preservation Index and PSNR, and 10% to only adaptive median filtering.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.911-917
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• 2023

The method of observing nodular changes on the liver surface using clinical ultrasonography is useful for diagnosing cirrhosis. However, the speckle noise that inevitably occurs in ultrasound images makes it difficult to identify changes in the liver surface and echo patterns, which has a negative impact on the diagnosis of cirrhosis. The purpose of this study is to model the median modified Wiener filter (MMWF), which can efficiently reduce noise in cirrhotic ultrasound images, and confirm its applicability. Ultrasound images were acquired using an ACR phantom and an actual cirrhotic patient, and the proposed MMWF algorithm and conventional noise reduction algorithm were applied to each image. Coefficient of variation (COV) and edge rise distance (ERD) were used as quantitative image quality evaluation factors for the acquired ultrasound images. We confirmed that the MMWF algorithm improved both COV and ERD values compared to the conventional noise reduction algorithm in both ACR phantom and real ultrasound images of cirrhotic patients. In conclusion, the proposed MMWF algorithm is expected to contribute to improving the diagnosis rate of cirrhosis patients by reducing the noise level and improving spatial resolution at the same time.