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Ultrasound Despeckle Methods

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Ultrasound Imaging

Abstract

Speckle, a form of multiplicative noise, affects imaging applications such as medical Ultrasound (US). The effectiveness of a segmentation and registration process can be improved when the noise is removed without affecting important image features. This chapter details the main speckle reducing filtering categories and provides an extended comparison of various state-of-the-art algorithms focusing on the anisotropic filters family. A series of in silico experiments has been designed with the aim to compare the performances of the state-of-the-art approaches on synthetic images corrupted by a controlled amount of speckle noise. Additional in vivo experiments have been designed for illustrating the interest of using an accurate filtering method as pre-processing stage, in order to improve the performance of the segmentation methods.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    EDISON: Code for the Edge Detection and Image SegmentatiON system, http://www.caip.rutgers.edu/riul/research/code/EDISON/index.html

  2. 2.

    http://viva.ee.virginia.edu/research_ultrasounddenoising.html

  3. 3.

    http://serdis.dis.ulpgc.es/~krissian/HomePage/

  4. 4.

    Implementation in Matlab software and computed on a Pentium IV dual core Intel processor.

  5. 5.

    http://www.shawnlankton.com/2007/05/active-contours/

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Vision Center, Campus UAB, Edifici O, Bellaterra, Spain

    Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta & Petia Radeva

  2. University of Barcelona, Gran Via de Les Cortes Catalanes, 585, 08007, Barcelona, Spain

    Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta & Petia Radeva

  3. Hospital universitari Germans Trias i Pujol, Carretera de Canyet s/n., 08916, Badalona, Spain

    Josepa Mauri Ferré

Authors
  1. Simone Balocco
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  2. Carlo Gatta
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  3. Josepa Mauri Ferré
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  4. Petia Radeva
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simone Balocco .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico Institute for Systems and Robotics, Lisboa, Portugal

    Joao Miguel Sanches

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA

    Andrew F. Laine

  3. Roseville, California, USA

    Jasjit S. Suri

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Balocco, S., Gatta, C., Ferré, J.M., Radeva, P. (2012). Ultrasound Despeckle Methods. In: Sanches, J., Laine, A., Suri, J. (eds) Ultrasound Imaging. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1180-2_3

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