New multiscale speckle suppression and edge enhancement with nonlinear diffusion and homomorphic filtering for medical ultrasound imaging

Speckle, shown as a granular pattern, considerably degrades the image quality of ultrasound B-mode imaging and lowers the performance of image segmentation and registration techniques. Thus, speckle reduction while preserving the tissue structure (e.g., edges and boundaries of lesions) is important for ultrasound B-mode imaging. In this paper, a new approach for speckle reduction and edge enhancement based on laplacian pyramid nonlinear diffusion and homomorphic filtering (LPNDHF) is proposed for ultrasound B-mode imaging. In LPNDHF, nonlinear diffusion with a weighting factor is applied in multi-scale domain (i.e., laplacian pyramid) for effectively suppressing the speckle. In addition, in order to overcome the drawback from the previous LPND method, i.e., blurred edges, homomorphic filtering for edge and contrast enhancement is also applied from a finer scale to a coarser scale. From the simulation study, the proposed LPNDHF method showed the higher edge preservation and structure similarity values compared to the LPND and LPND with shock filtering (LPNDSF). Also, the LPNDHF provided the higher CNR values compared to LPND and LPNDSF, i.e., 5.02 vs. 3.66 and 2.91, respectively. From the tissue mimicking phantom study, the similar improvement in CNR was achieved from the LPNDHF over LPND and LPNDSF, i.e., 2.35 vs. 1.83 and 1.30. Moreover, the consistent results were obtained with the in vivo abdominal study. These preliminary results demonstrate that the proposed LPNDHF can improve the image quality of ultrasound B-mode imaging by increasing contrast and enhancing the specific signal details while effectively suppressing speckle.