An adaptive speckle suppression filter for medical ultrasonic imaging

An adaptive smoothing technique for speckle suppression in medical B-scan ultrasonic imaging is presented. The technique is based on filtering with appropriately shaped and sized local kernels. For each image pixel, a filtering kernel, which fits to the local homogeneous region containing the processed pixel, is obtained through a local statistics based region growing technique. The performance of the proposed filter has been tested on the phantom and tissue images. The results show that the filter effectively reduces the speckle while preserving the resolvable details. The simulation results are presented in a comparative way with two existing speckle suppression methods.