Title :
Speckle reduction in ultrasound images of atherosclerotic carotid plaque
Author :
Loizou, C. ; Christodoulou, C. ; Pattichis, C.S. ; Istepanian, R. ; Pantziaris, M. ; Nicolaides, A.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Intercollege Limassol Campus, Cyprus
Abstract :
The objective of this work was to develop six speckle reduction-filtering techniques and evaluate them together with texture analysis in the assessment of 240 ultrasound images of the carotid artery. The de-speckled filters are based on anisotropic diffusion, local statistics with higher moments, and geometric filtering. Results showed that some improvement in class separation (between symptomatic and asymptomatic plaques) of the images was evident after de-speckle filtering.
Keywords :
biological tissues; biomedical ultrasonics; higher order statistics; image texture; medical image processing; nonlinear filters; speckle; ultrasonic imaging; anisotropic diffusion; asymptomatic plaques; atherosclerotic carotid plaque; carotid artery; class separation; filtering techniques; geometric filtering; higher moments; local statistics; speckle reduction; symptomatic plaques; texture analysis; ultrasound images; Anisotropic magnetoresistance; Carotid arteries; Electronic mail; Filtering; Filters; Image texture analysis; Smoothing methods; Speckle; Statistics; Ultrasonic imaging;
Conference_Titel :
Digital Signal Processing, 2002. DSP 2002. 2002 14th International Conference on
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-7503-3
DOI :
10.1109/ICDSP.2002.1028143
