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Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion with lattice Boltzmann method for medical ultrasound despeckling

  • Received: 02 April 2019 Accepted: 23 July 2019 Published: 19 August 2019
  • Medical ultrasound images are corrupted by speckle noise, and despeckling methods are required to effectively and efficiently reduce speckle noise while simultaneously preserving details of tissues. This paper proposes a despeckling approach named the Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion coupled with the lattice Boltzmann method (GAD-LBM), which uses the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) to fast solve the partial differential equation of an anisotropic diffusion model embedded with the Gabor edge detector. We evaluated the GAD-LBM on both synthetic and clinical ultrasound images, and the experimental results suggested that the GAD-LBM was superior to other nine methods in speckle suppression and detail preservation. For synthetic and clinical images, the computation time of the GAD-LBM was about 1/90 to 1/20 of the GAD solved with the finite difference, indicating the advantage of the GAD-LBM in efficiency. The GAD-LBM not only has excellent ability of noise reduction and detail preservation for ultrasound images, but also has advantages in computational efficiency.

    Citation: Haohao Xu, Yuchen Gong, Xinyi Xia, Dong Li, Zhuangzhi Yan, Jun Shi, Qi Zhang. Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion with lattice Boltzmann method for medical ultrasound despeckling[J]. Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering, 2019, 16(6): 7546-7561. doi: 10.3934/mbe.2019379

    Related Papers:

  • Medical ultrasound images are corrupted by speckle noise, and despeckling methods are required to effectively and efficiently reduce speckle noise while simultaneously preserving details of tissues. This paper proposes a despeckling approach named the Gabor-based anisotropic diffusion coupled with the lattice Boltzmann method (GAD-LBM), which uses the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) to fast solve the partial differential equation of an anisotropic diffusion model embedded with the Gabor edge detector. We evaluated the GAD-LBM on both synthetic and clinical ultrasound images, and the experimental results suggested that the GAD-LBM was superior to other nine methods in speckle suppression and detail preservation. For synthetic and clinical images, the computation time of the GAD-LBM was about 1/90 to 1/20 of the GAD solved with the finite difference, indicating the advantage of the GAD-LBM in efficiency. The GAD-LBM not only has excellent ability of noise reduction and detail preservation for ultrasound images, but also has advantages in computational efficiency.


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