A Transform Method to Remove Ultrasound Artifacts

Reverberation and multi-path reflection artifacts are a common problem in ultrasound imaging. We propose a novel method to remove these artifacts. Regions adversely affected by these artifacts are replaced with textures that resemble the underlying object(s), which were originally obscured. Our proposed method incorporates optimally soft thresholding the 2D discrete wavelet transform of the artifact regions to produce a near optimal estimate of the reflectivity values due only to the reverberation and multi-path reflection artifacts. Simply subtracting this estimate from the original reflectivity values, we attain a near optimal estimate of the artifact free reflectivity values. We provide simulated and B mode images to substantiate the benefits of this method in producing an artifact removed image