Ultrasound medical imaging is widely used nowadays in clinical application due to its intuitive, convenient, safety, non-invasive, and low cost. However, ultrasound image formation always comes with speckle-noise which will greatly reduce the image quality, and makes the identification and analysis of image detail become more challenging. Hence, we present an extended robust diffusion algorithm...

This paper presents an approach for reducing speckle in three dimensional (3D) ultrasound images. A 2D speckle reduction technique, speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion (SRAD), is explored and extended to 3D. 3D SRAD is advantageous in that, like 2D SRAD, it keeps the advantages of the conventional anisotropic diffusion and the traditional speckle reducing filter, the Lee filter, by exploitin...

This paper presents a system for acquiring three dimensional ultrasound data and extracting surfaces of the examined structures. The acquisition is performed freehand with a PC-based two-dimensional ultrasound machine and an optical tracker. The extraction of surfaces from ultrasound data is normally inhibited by speckle, shadowing and gaps in the acquired data. A new method is developed that e...

The correlation function of the echo signal intensities at detectability via spatial and frequency compounding [2–5]. These a fixed region on a series of B-mode images is directly related to the speckle reduction methods involve the averaging of images in change of speckle patterns between these images. An indication is which the speckle pattern has been changed. Recently, assessment given here...

Laser speckle imaging (LSI) is a noninvasive optical imaging technique able to provide wide-field two-dimensional maps of moving particles. Raw laser speckle images are typically taken with a scientific-grade monochrome camera. We demonstrate that a digital single-lens reflex (dSLR) camera with a Bayer filter is able to provide similar sensitivity despite taking information only from a specific...

A speckle interferometer which can measure whole field three-dimensional displacements continuously and dynamically has been built. Three different wavelength lasers are used to produce the speckle interferograms of the two in-plane displacements (displacements in the x- and y-direction) and one out-of-plane displacement (displacement in the z-direction), respectively. One color CCD camera is e...

We present and characterize a sequential angular compounding method for reducing speckle contrast in optical coherence tomography images of paint layers. The results are compared with postprocessing methods, and we show that the compounding technique can improve the speckle contrast ratio in B-scans by better than a factor of 2 in exchange for a negligible loss of resolution. As a result, image...

This paper deals with a detailed morphological and photometric investigation of solar small-scale features in the vicinity of an irregular sunspot group. The observations were performed with the Vacuum Tower Telescope at the Observatorio del Teide/Tenerife on May 18, 1994. The speckle masking method has been applied to reconstruct almost diffraction limited filtergrams in two different waveleng...

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES The development of left ventricular dysfunction after mitral valve replacement is a common problem in patients with chronic severe mitral regurgitation. Assessment of myocardial deformation enables myocardial contractility to be accurately estimated. Our aim was to compare the value of the preoperative strain and strain rate derived by either speckle-tracking echocar...

Evaluation of myocardial mechanics, although complex, has now entered the clinical arena, thanks to the introduction of bedside imaging techniques, such as speckletracking echocardiography. Overcoming the limitations of previous techniques, such as tissue Doppler Imaging (TDI), bi-dimensional (2D) and, only recently, three-dimensional (3D) speckle tracking, allows a fast, reproducible, and semi...