TY - JOUR
T1 - A motion compounding technique for speckle reduction in ultrasound images
AU - Lin, Cheng Hsien
AU - Sun, Yung Nien
AU - Lin, Chii Jeng
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors wish to express their appreciation for the support from the National Science Council under contract NSC91-2213-E-006-060. Also, this work made use of shared facilities supported by the Program of Top 100 Universities Advancement, Ministry of Education, Taiwan, R.O.C. The authors also like to thank Professor Pai-Chi Li, National Taiwan University, for providing phantom images and helpful discussions.
PY - 2010/6
Y1 - 2010/6
N2 - The quality of ultrasound images is usually influenced by speckle noise and the temporal decorrelation of the speckle patterns. To reduce the speckle noise, compounding techniques have been widely applied. Partially correlated images scanned on the same subject cross-section are combined to generate a compound image with improved image quality. However, the compounding technique might introduce image blurring if the transducer or the target moves too fast. This blurring effect becomes especially critical when assessing tissue deformation in clinical motion examinations. In this paper, an ultrasound motion compounding system is proposed to improve the quality of ultrasound motion sequences. The proposed motion compounding technique uses a hierarchical adaptive feature weighted motion estimation method to realign the frames before compounding. Each frame is first registered and warped to the reference frame before being compounded to reduce the speckle noise. Experimental results showed that the motion could be assessed accurately and better visualization could be achieved for the compound images, with improved signal-to-noise and contrast-to-noise ratios.
AB - The quality of ultrasound images is usually influenced by speckle noise and the temporal decorrelation of the speckle patterns. To reduce the speckle noise, compounding techniques have been widely applied. Partially correlated images scanned on the same subject cross-section are combined to generate a compound image with improved image quality. However, the compounding technique might introduce image blurring if the transducer or the target moves too fast. This blurring effect becomes especially critical when assessing tissue deformation in clinical motion examinations. In this paper, an ultrasound motion compounding system is proposed to improve the quality of ultrasound motion sequences. The proposed motion compounding technique uses a hierarchical adaptive feature weighted motion estimation method to realign the frames before compounding. Each frame is first registered and warped to the reference frame before being compounded to reduce the speckle noise. Experimental results showed that the motion could be assessed accurately and better visualization could be achieved for the compound images, with improved signal-to-noise and contrast-to-noise ratios.
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U2 - 10.1007/s10278-008-9172-6
DO - 10.1007/s10278-008-9172-6
M3 - Article
C2 - 19130132
AN - SCOPUS:77952237187
VL - 23
SP - 246
EP - 257
JO - Journal of Digital Imaging
JF - Journal of Digital Imaging
SN - 0897-1889
IS - 3
ER -