Refinement for Ocular Ultrasound Images Quality by Utilizing Combination of Enhancement Techniques

Abstract

Ultrasound has been used as a diagnostic modality for many intraocular diseases, due its safety, low cost, real time and wide availability. Unfortunately, ultrasound images suffer from speckle artifact that is tissue dependent. In this work, we will offer a method to reduce speckle noise and improve ultrasound image to raise the human diagnostic performance. This method combined undecimated wavelet transform with a wavelet coefficient mapping function: where UDWT used to eliminate the noise and a wavelet coefficient mapping function used to enhance the contrast of denoised images obtained from the first component. This methods can be used not only as a means for improving visual quality of medical images but also as a preprocessing module for computer-aided detection/diagnosis systems to improve the performance of screening and detecting regions of interest in images. The proposed method is experimentally evaluated via 60 ultrasound images of eye. It is demonstrated that the proposed method can further improve the image quality of ocular ultrasound; the results reveal the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.