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3-D Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion for speckle noise suppression in dynamic ultrasound images

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Abstract

Speckle noise contaminates medical ultrasound images, and the suppression of speckle noise is helpful for image interpretation. Traditional ultrasound denoising (i.e., despeckling) methods are developed on two-dimensional static images. However, one of the advantages of ultrasonography is its nature of dynamic imaging. A method for dynamic ultrasound despeckling is expected to incorporate both the spatial and temporal information in successive images of dynamic ultrasound and thus yield better denoising performance. Here we regard a dynamic ultrasound video as three-dimensional (3-D) images with two dimensions in the spatial domain and one in the temporal domain, and we propose a despeckling algorithm for dynamic ultrasound named the 3-D Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion (GAD-3D). The GAD-3D expands the classic two-dimensional Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion (GAD) into 3-D domain. First, we proposed a robust 3-D Gabor-based edge detector by capturing the edge with 3-D Gabor transformation. Then we embed this novel detector into the partial differential equation of GAD to guide the 3-D diffusion process. In the simulation experiment, when the noise variance is as high as 0.14, the GAD-3D improves the Pratt’s figure of merit, mean structural similarity index and peak signal-to-noise ratio by 24.32%, 10.98%, and 6.51%, respectively, compared with the best values of seven other methods. Experimental results on clinical dynamic ultrasonography suggest that the GAD-3D outperforms the other seven methods in noise reduction and detail preservation. The GAD-3D is effective for dynamic ultrasound despeckling and may be potentially valuable for disease assessment in dynamic medical ultrasonography.

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Funding

The work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61671281, 61911530249 and 62071285).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, The SMART (Smart Medicine and AI-based Radiology Technology) Lab, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

    Haobo Chen, Haohao Xu, Peng Shi, Yuchen Gong & Qi Zhang

  2. Institute of Biomedical Engineering, School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

    Haobo Chen, Haohao Xu, Peng Shi, Yuchen Gong & Qi Zhang

  3. Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Zhen Qiu

  4. Hangzhou YITU Healthcare Technology, Hangzhou, China

    Lei Shi & Qi Zhang

Authors
  1. Haobo Chen
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  2. Haohao Xu
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  3. Peng Shi
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  4. Yuchen Gong
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  5. Zhen Qiu
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  6. Lei Shi
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  7. Qi Zhang
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All authors were involved in the work leading up to the manuscript. The results were appropriately placed in the context of prior and existing research.

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Correspondence to Lei Shi or Qi Zhang.

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Chen, H., Xu, H., Shi, P. et al. 3-D Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion for speckle noise suppression in dynamic ultrasound images. Phys Eng Sci Med 44, 207–219 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13246-020-00969-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13246-020-00969-x

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