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An Integrated De-speckling Approach for Medical Ultrasound Images Based on Wavelet and Trilateral Filter

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Abstract

Speckle noise is a granular artifact in medical ultrasound images. It causes serious problems and hinders the development of automatic diagnosis technology. In this paper, a novel and integrated approach is proposed to address the de-noising problem by using wavelet transformation and trilateral filter. Firstly, a dynamic additive model is developed to account for the medical ultrasound signal with speckle noise. Secondly, in accordance with the statistical property of the additive model, an adaptive wavelet shrinkage algorithm is applied to the noisy medical signal. Particularly, the algorithm is significant to the high-frequency component of the speckle noise in the wavelet domain. Thirdly, but most importantly, the low-frequency component of the speckle noise is suppressed by a trilateral filter. It simultaneously reduces the speckle and impulse noise in real set data. Finally, a lot of experiments are conducted on both synthetic images and real clinical ultrasound images for authenticity. Compared with other existing methods, experimental results show that the proposed algorithm demonstrates an excellent de-noising performance, offers great flexibility and substantially sharpens the desirable edge.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions that will help improve the manuscript. The authors would also like to thank the people who provide the MATLAB code or executable file, especially Timothy Huegerich for his trilateral filter. The work is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (60974042) and by Research Project of Zhejiang Province for Public Welfare (2016C33122).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zhijiang College, Zhejiang University of Technology, Shaoxing, 312030, China

    Ju Zhang

  2. College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 310023, China

    Lili Wu & Guangkuo Lin

  3. Department of Ultrasound, Zhejiang Hospital, Hangzhou, 310013, China

    Yun Cheng

Authors
  1. Ju Zhang
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  2. Lili Wu
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  3. Guangkuo Lin
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  4. Yun Cheng
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yun Cheng.

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Zhang, J., Wu, L., Lin, G. et al. An Integrated De-speckling Approach for Medical Ultrasound Images Based on Wavelet and Trilateral Filter. Circuits Syst Signal Process 36, 297–314 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-016-0305-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-016-0305-8

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