Fast algorithm of 3D median filter for medical image despeckling

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3-D) median filtering is very useful to eliminate speckle noise from a medical imaging source, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and ultrasonic imaging. 3-D median filtering is characterized by its higher computation complexity. N³(N³-1)/2 comparison operations would be required for 3-D median filtering with N×N×N window if the conventional bubble-sorting algorithm is adopted. In this paper, an efficient fast algorithm for 3-D median filtering was presented, which considerably reduced the computation complexity for extracting the median of a 3-D data array. Compared to the state-of-the-art, the proposed method could reduce the computation complexity of 3-D median filtering by 33%. It results in efficiently reducing the system delay of the 3-D median filter by software implementation, and the system cost and power consumption by hardware implementation.