Automatic dynamic range adjustment using log average for medical ultrasound imaging

In medical ultrasound imaging, dynamic range (DR) is one of the essential parameters that determine the quality of the clinical images. Typically, DR is given with a fixed value and operators have to adjust it in manual which causes low productivity. To solve this problem, there have been developed a number of algorithms adjusting DR automatically. In this paper, a new automatic DR adjustment (ADRA) method using log average is proposed. The proposed method automatically adjusts a DR value by manipulating input images similar to the reference image. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the similarity between the reference and input images is measured by computing correlation coefficients. With in vivo experiments, the correlation coefficients were improved from 0.7086 to 0.9909 and from 0.9436 to 0.9952 for kidney and liver data, respectively. These results show that the proposed method can enhance the similarity between the reference and input images. Thus, with the proposed method, DR can be automatically adjusted without any manual intervention from the user.