3-D Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion for speckle noise suppression in dynamic ultrasound images

Speckle noise contaminates medical ultrasound images, and the suppression of speckle noise is helpful for image interpretation. Traditional ultrasound denoising (i.e., despeckling) methods are developed on two-dimensional static images. However, one of the advantages of ultrasonography is its nature of dynamic imaging. A method for dynamic ultrasound despeckling is expected to incorporate both the spatial and temporal information in successive images of dynamic ultrasound and thus yield better denoising performance. Here we regard a dynamic ultrasound video as three-dimensional (3-D) images with two dimensions in the spatial domain and one in the temporal domain, and we propose a despeckling algorithm for dynamic ultrasound named the 3-D Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion (GAD-3D). The GAD-3D expands the classic two-dimensional Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion (GAD) into 3-D domain. First, we proposed a robust 3-D Gabor-based edge detector by capturing the edge with 3-D Gabor transformation. Then we embed this novel detector into the partial differential equation of GAD to guide the 3-D diffusion process. In the simulation experiment, when the noise variance is as high as 0.14, the GAD-3D improves the Pratt’s figure of merit, mean structural similarity index and peak signal-to-noise ratio by 24.32%, 10.98%, and 6.51%, respectively, compared with the best values of seven other methods. Experimental results on clinical dynamic ultrasonography suggest that the GAD-3D outperforms the other seven methods in noise reduction and detail preservation. The GAD-3D is effective for dynamic ultrasound despeckling and may be potentially valuable for disease assessment in dynamic medical ultrasonography.