Title :
STFT-based denoising of elastograms
Author :
Hon, T.K. ; Subramaniam, S.R. ; Georgakis, A. ; Alty, S.
Author_Institution :
Div. of Eng., King´´s Coll. London, London, UK
Abstract :
In ultrasound elastography, axial strains of the examined tissue are calculated by the differentiation of the measured axial displacements. However, the results become obscured as high-frequency noise is amplified by the gradient operator. In this paper, we propose an advanced denoising method for axial displacements with the aim of accurately estimating their axial strains. The proposed algorithm is based on the short-term Fourier transform modified by a suitable filtering function which is able to accommodate the distinct non-stationarities present in the displacement data. Experimentation on synthetic elastograms has shown that the presented method yields accurate results and outperforms other, commonly used denoising techniques.
Keywords :
Fourier transforms; biological tissues; biomedical ultrasonics; filtering theory; medical signal processing; signal denoising; STFT-based denoising; axial strains; denoising techniques; elastograms; filtering function; measured axial displacement differentiation; short-term Fourier transform; synthetic elastograms; ultrasound elastography; Biomedical imaging; Fourier transforms; Low pass filters; Noise reduction; Strain; Ultrasonic imaging; Ultrasound elastography; short-time Fourier transform; signal denoising;
Conference_Titel :
Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2011 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Prague
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4577-0538-0
Electronic_ISBN :
1520-6149
DOI :
10.1109/ICASSP.2011.5946494