Noise reduction in echocardigraphy images using Contourlet transform

Echocardiographic images have considerable noises (Especially speckle noise) because of their inherent nature and do not have desirable quality which makes difficult to analyze them. Therefore, it is essential to run pre-processing to reduce noises before their interpretation and analysis. In this paper, we have used Contourlet method to reduce the noise of echocardiographic images. In order to evaluate and compare the proposed method with some common de noising methods, three different criteria (mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio and signal to mean square error) are used. The results showed that the proposed method is much better than the other methods. Moreover, according to expert echo cardiologist opinion, we have achieved maximum resolution other common de noising methods.