Denoising Ultrasound Medical Images

Abstract

Medical ultrasound imaging has revolutioned the diagnostics of human body in the last few decades. The major drawback of ultrasound medical images is speckle noise. Speckle noise in ultrasound images is because of multiple reflections of ultrasound waves from hard tissues. Speckle noise degrades the medical ultrasound images lessening the visible quality of the image. The aim of this paper is to improve the image quality of ultrasound medical images by applying block based hard and soft thresholding on wavelet coefficients. Medical ultrasound image transformation to wavelet domain uses debauchee's mother wavelet. Divide the approximate and detailed coefficients into uniform blocks of size 8×8, 16×16, 32×32 and 64×64. Hard and soft thresholding on these blocks of approximate and detailed coefficients reduces speckle noise. Inverse transformation to original spatial domain produces a noise reduced ultrasound image. Experiments on medical ultrasound images obtained from diagnostic centers in Vijayawada, India show good improvements to ultrasound images visually. Quality of improved images in measured using peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), image quality index (IQI), structural similarity index (SSIM).