2D biological representations with reduced speckle obtained from two perpendicular ultrasonic arrays

Technol Health Care. 2016 Apr 29:24 Suppl 2:S561-8. doi: 10.3233/THC-161182.

Abstract

Ultrasound diagnosis is a widely used medical tool. Among the various ultrasound techniques, ultrasonic imaging is particularly relevant. This paper presents an improvement to a two-dimensional (2D) ultrasonic system using measurements taken from perpendicular planes, where digital signal processing techniques are used to combine one-dimensional (1D) A-scans were acquired by individual transducers in arrays located in perpendicular planes. An algorithm used to combine measurements is improved based on the wavelet transform, which includes a denoising step during the 2D representation generation process. The inclusion of this new denoising stage generates higher quality 2D representations with a reduced level of speckling. The paper includes different 2D representations obtained from noisy A-scans and compares the improvements obtained by including the denoising stage.

Keywords: 2D representation; denoising; perpendicular arrays; ultrasonics; wavelets.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Humans
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Phantoms, Imaging
  • Ultrasonography*
  • Wavelet Analysis*