Objective and subjective evaluations of quality for speckle reduced echocardiography

This paper presents the results of a study into the subjective effect of speckle reduction filtering in echocardiography, as assessed by clinical experts. Echocardiographic videos were filtered by a number of speckle reduction methods to produce a set of test videos with varying levels of speckle content. Six practicing cardiac technicians were asked to rate each video in three scoring categories, with the aim of quantifying their subjective evaluation of the diagnostic usefulness and the level of speckle in each video. The change in expert scores due to filtering is analyzed. Inter-expert difference in the evaluation is investigated, and intra-expert analysis of the association between each score category is also performed. In addition, a number of objective quality metrics are applied to the filtered videos, and the correlation between these metrics and the expert scores is determined. Results indicate that, while there are inter-expert differences, strong intra-expert relationships exist between the score categories. Furthermore each of the three subjective score categories is strongly associated with one of the objective quality metrics.