Noise reduction in intravascular ultrasound images using curvelet transform and adaptive complex diffusion filter: A comparative study

Speckle noise reduction is the first and important step for intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image analysis. A comparison between the performances of the curvelet transform and adaptive complex diffusion filter method for ultrasound despeckling is presented in this paper. In this study, the adaptive complex diffusion filter which is widely used for despeckling, is applied to real intravascular ultrasound images and results were quantitatively and visually compared to that of curvelet based despeckling. The results show that curvelet based method outperforms the adaptive complex diffusion filter and can effectively reduce most of the speckle noise content of an intravascular ultrasound image.