Speckle reduction using similar block images between adjacent slices for 3D ultrasound images

This paper proposes 3D speckle reduction method using the similarity block image for the speckle reduction in the 3D ultrasound volume image. The proposed method regenerates the 3D volume that increases the 3D inter-frame consistency by generating similar images to the current frame from the adjacent frames. In the multiscale volume transformed by a 3D wavelet, the speckle is reduced and the edge of the tissue is enhanced via anisotropic diffusion. The 3D contrast enhancement algorithm using the coefficient adjustment function in the multiscale volume domain is also proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance in terms of all of the PSNR and CNR than the conventional methods.