Investigation on speckle reduction in medical ultrasound images

Abstract

Ultrasound imaging has features like noninvasive nature low newlinecost portability and real time image formation capacitywhich makes this newlinediagnostic tool attractive and hence has become an important imaging newlinemodality in medical diagnoses However the usefulness of this imaging is newlinedegraded by the presence of signal dependent noise known as speckle The newlinepresence of speckle hampers the perception and extraction of fine details from newlinethe ultrasound image Therefore only skilled radiologists can make effective newlinediagnosis and hence its use is limited in a wide medical network Ultrasonic newlinespeckle is an interference effect caused by scattering of the ultrasonic beam newlinefrom very small structures within a tissue which is comparable to the newlinephenomena encountered in other coherent imaging such as Synthetic Aperture newlineRadar and LASER newline newline