Reduction of speckle noise from medical images using principal component analysis image fusion

Images captured by different medical devices contain intrinsic artefacts, like ultrasound, CT, MRI images often contain speckle noise, which is the result of the destructive and constructive coherent summation of echoes. In these images, the speckle noise must be reduced cautiously as it also contains diagnostic information. Thus the despeckling algorithms should reduce speckle in homogeneous areas of the image and edges in the image should be preserved. In this paper a method to reduce the speckle noise is proposed which uses the concept of fusion. The performance of the proposed algorithm is quantified by calculating measures like MSE, SNR, PSNR and MSSI, which gives information about the extent of feature preservation and denoising.