Reduction of the speckle noise in echocardiographic images by a cubic spline filter

Abstract

One of the main problems to resolve in the processing of biomedical images is the reduction of noise. The problem is specially important if the noise has a multiplicative nature (speckle noise), for instance if the object of analysis is an ultrasonic image. In this report we carry out a review of techniques which can be used to reduce this type of noise on four-chamber view B-mode echocardiographic images in an appropriated way. Different ways of nonlinear filtering, adaptive techniques based on the statistical ordering and a cubic spline interpolation will be shown as suitable techniques for this objective but regarding quantitative and qualitative results we have obtained, we can confirm that a cubic spline filter is the most suitable filter that we have reviewed.