Paper
30 May 2001 Speckle reduction based on signal decorrelation under different strain states
Pai-Chi Li, Chi-Lin Wu, Mei-Ju Chen
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
Low contrast detectability of diagnostic ultrasound is fundamentally limited by speckle brightness variations. Several compounding techniques have been proposed for speckle reduction by incoherently averaging partially correlated measurements. The conventional approaches obtain partially correlated measurements by imaging the same object from different spatial positions or within different frequency ranges. In this paper, a new technique based on signal decorrelation under different strain states is proposed. The different strain states can be created using external applied forces. By correcting on ly the in-plane motion, images under different strain states have identical characteristics except for speckle appearance due to the un- corrected out-of-plane motion. Therefore, these images can be combined for speckle reduction without significantly affecting the in-plane spatial resolution. Efficacy of the new compounding technique was previously tested using data acquired by a single crystal transducer. However, only the axial motion was corrected and RF data were used to estimate the displacement fields. In this paper, results are extended to full two-dimensional motion correction using post-detection images from a commercial array system. Images from human thyroids and gelatin based phantoms are investigated. It is shown that speckle brightness variation's can be effectively reduced without significant degradation in spatial resolution.
© (2001) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Pai-Chi Li, Chi-Lin Wu, and Mei-Ju Chen "Speckle reduction based on signal decorrelation under different strain states", Proc. SPIE 4325, Medical Imaging 2001: Ultrasonic Imaging and Signal Processing, (30 May 2001); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.428196
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KEYWORDS
Speckle

Tissues

Motion estimation

Imaging systems

Point spread functions

Spatial resolution

Data acquisition

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