Anisotropic diffusion technique to eliminate speckle noise in continuous-wave Doppler ultrasound spectrogram

Abstract

Paper described a simplified speckled elimination algorithm for the reconstruction of continuous-wave (CW) Doppler ultrasound spectrogram. Standard Nonlinear Anisotropic Diffusion (SNAD) technique fails to eliminate the speckle noise, blurs the interregional area of neighbouring speckle clusters and regulates the heat flow to preserve the systolic and diastolic peaks in the spectrogram. To resolve this problem, author modelled a kernel, conductance and diffusion function to regulate the blurring of speckle clusters and sharpen the high-contrast edges over low-contrast ones. Paper analysed the performance based on the variation of conductance (C), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), root mean square error (RMSE) and structural similarity index (SSIM) of each pairs of speckled and despeckled spectrograms. Quantitative analysis reveals that the minimised version of the kernel effectively regulates the flow of heat at edges with a high SNR (8 dB) and PSNR (>20 dB) for a low-frequency range of 20-25 Hz. SSIM (>0.9) shows an efficient structural reconstruction that identifies the lower and higher local SSIM indices as dark and bright pixels on SSIM maps. Hence, the algorithm performs its best at lower peak frequencies in the Doppler spectrograms.

Keywords:

• Anisotropic diffusion conductance;
• Doppler ultrasound;
• speckles

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

Author received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.