On estimating de-speckled and speckle components from B-mode ultrasound images

The information encoded in ultrasound speckle is often discarded but it is widely recognized that this phenomenon is dependent of the intrinsic acoustic properties of tissues. In this paper we propose a robust method to estimate the de-speckled and speckle components from the ultrasound data with the purpose of tissue characterization. A de-speckling method, which can conveniently work with either Radio Frequency (RF) or B-mode data, contributes to an improvement on the visualization of anatomical details, while providing useful fields from where echogenicity and texture features can be extracted. The adequacy of the RF image retrieval and despeckling methods are tackled using both synthetic and real ultrasonic data.