Simulator Development for Speckle Reduction by Spatial Compounding in Ultrasonic Diagnostic Imaging System

Spatial compounding is an speckle reducing imaging technique in which a number of ultrasound images of a given target that have been obtained from multiple view points or angles are combined into a single compounded image by combining the data received from each data point in the compounded image. In this paper, we describe the development of the software environment for the spatial compounding which consists of resampling module that realigns the ultrasound echo sample data; compounding module that combines multiple images into a single compounded image; post-filtering module that processes the compounded image, and scan conversion module that converts the ultrasound echo sample data into a digital image to be displayed on the screen. This software environment is useful in testing various compounding algorithms. The compounded images are presented and seam line artifact is illustrated. The result of seam line suppression is presented