Speckle reduction and segmentation in echocardiographic images: A comparative study

The ultrasound imaging is a coherent imaging technique, the resulting images are characterized by a grainy appearance called speckle. In that case the ultrasound images are difficult to use automatically in clinical use, then treatments are required for this type of images. In fact, a pre-treatment phase is essential to filter the speckle and to improve the quality of ultrasound images which will then be segmented to extract the necessary forms that exist. This paper represents the importance of the pre-treatment for segmentation applied to cardiac echographic images. Speckle filtering is realized by means of the wavelet transform algorithm, and then we use Snakes algorithm to locate and extract cardiac structures.