Real time adaptive ultrasound speckle reduction and coherence enhancement

We present a novel approach for speckle reduction and coherence enhancement of ultrasound images. The algorithm maximally low-pass filters those parts of the image which correspond to fully developed speckle, while substantially preserving information associated with resolved-object structure. The proposed algorithm is based on coherent anisotropic diffusion with an efficient discretization scheme that could be used as a preprocessing step for online visualization of ultrasound images even when it is implemented on a PC based system. It is shown experimentally that this technique produces superior results when compared to the results obtained from similar methods.