Despeckle filtering in ultrasound video of the common carotid artery

Christos P. Loizou, Takis Kasparis, Pavlos Christodoulides, Charoula Theofanous, Marios Pantziaris, Efthyvoulos Kyriakou, Constandinos S. Pattichis

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Noise reduction is essential for increasing the visual quality or as a preprocessing step for further automated analysis in video sequences and video coding. The objective of this work was to investigate four different video despeckle filtering techniques and evaluate them using visual assessment by two medical experts, texture features analysis, and video quality evaluation metrics. The four proposed video despeckle filtering techniques were evaluated on 10 ultrasound videos of the common carotid artery (CCA). The filters were applied on the whole video frame and in a selected by the user region of interest (ROI) which included the atherosclerotic carotid plaque. The despeckle filters were based on linear filtering (DsFlsmv), hybrid median filtering (DsFhmedian), nonlinear filtering (DsFkuwahara) and speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion (DsFsrad) filtering. Our results showed that, the best video despeckle filtering methods were the linear filter DsFlsmv, followed by the hybrid median filter DsFhmedian. Both filters improved the visual perception evaluation by experts and gave better texture and video quality metrics. Further work on a larger number of videos and by employing additional despeckle filtering techniques is required for the evaluation of video despeckle filtering methods on ultrasound videos of the CCA.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIEEE 12th International Conference on BioInformatics and BioEngineering, BIBE 2012
Pages721-726
Number of pages6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Event12th IEEE International Conference on BioInformatics and BioEngineering, BIBE 2012 - Larnaca, Cyprus
Duration: 11 Nov 201213 Nov 2012

Other

Other12th IEEE International Conference on BioInformatics and BioEngineering, BIBE 2012
Country/TerritoryCyprus
CityLarnaca
Period11/11/1213/11/12

Keywords

  • carotid artery
  • Despeckling
  • texture analysis
  • video

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