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KMID : 1144120130030020087
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Biomedical Engineering Letters
2013 Volume.3 No. 2 p.87 ~ p.94
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Speckle reduction and contrast enhancement of ultrasound images using anisotropic diffusion with Jensen Shannon divergence operator
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Jose Jisha
Prahladan Anil
Nair Madhu S.
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Abstract
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Purpose: Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely used for diagnosis these days due to its advantages such as no-radiation, portability and low cost. But the two inherent drawbacks of US imaging are low contrast and speckle noise. The objective of the proposed algorithm is to simultaneously enhance the contrast and suppress the speckle noise thereby improving the visual quality of the US image.
Methods: Normalization and fuzzification are used as the preprocessing steps for the contrast enhancement and the mapping of intensity values to brightness degree of US images. A fuzzy sub-pixel fractional partial difference with Jensen Shannon divergence operator is proposed here for determining whether a pixel is noise or edge, and thereby reducing the speckle noise. The proposed method is a generalization of first, second and fourth order difference with weight information collected from the overall view of the image.
Results: Proposed method has been tested both on synthetic and real ultrasound images. The results show that the proposed method improves preservation of relevant information without compromising the quality of visual appearance. FOM and Contrast measures prove the superiority of the proposed method over conventional as well as advanced methods.
Conclusions: The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DJ method has the advantage of maximizing speckle reduction and contrast enhancement, with great accuracy for slightly varying edges and the fine details are well preserved. The method can improve the quality of US images, and will be useful for CAD systems for cancer detection and classification based on US images.
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KEYWORD
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Anisotropic diffusion, Diffusion and Jensen Shannon Divergence (DJ), Fuzzy sub pixel fractional partial difference, Speckle reduction, Ultrasound (US) imaging, Edge and contrast enhancement
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