A novel technique of liver ultrasound image enhancement by modified Fourier transform for Bile Duct Cancer surveillance

The Bile Duct Cancer (Cholangiocarcinoma:CCA) is one of the problems for the public health in Thailand. The liver ultrasound image is the tool for the CCA surveillance. However, the liver ultrasound images contain motion blur and unsmooth image which decrease the CCA surveillance performance. This paper presents a new technique for the enhancement of the liver ultrasound image (ELU). The main idea of the ELU method is to compensate the motion blur of the liver ultrasound image. And then, the liver ultrasound images are smoothed by using ELU method. The proposed method consist of two processes which are the proposed modified Fourier transforms for the motion blur compensation (MFMC) method and liver ultrasound (LU) smoothing method. The MFMC method is performed in time domain that compensates the motion blur value into the liver ultrasound image by using the modified Fourier transform method. And then, the regions of liver ultrasound image are smoothed by the LU smoothing method which can diffuse the homogeneous region. To evaluate the proposed method performance, The Highlight line (HL), The Contrast to Noise Ratio (CNR) and the Equivalent number of looks (ENL) are applied to measure the performance. The experimental results showed that the proposed method is able to give the high enhanced performance for the liver ultrasound image than other methods.