A portable measuring system for cross-sectional ultrasound images using spatial compounding and edge sharpening

This paper proposes a compensation for a blurred image caused by misregistration in spatial compounding. The edge sharpening based on morphological operations is applied to the compounded image. A portable measuring system of a cross-sectional ultrasound image is designed for measuring body composition. The system is developed for non-medical applications, for example, measurement of the volume of muscle and subcutaneous fat in lower extremities, upper extremities and abdomen for health care and sports science. A number of partially overlapping images that have been obtained from multiple angles are combined into a single compounded image. In experiment on human abdomen, the image quality was improved in speckle suppression and edge enhancement by using ensemble averaging and morphological edge sharpening. Resulting wide field-of-view image was sufficiently deblurred without emphasizing noise.