Systematic Evaluation on Speckle Suppression Methods in Examination of Ultrasound Breast Images

Breast ultrasound is an important tool used in the medical treatment and diagnosis of breast tumor. However, noise defined as speckles are generated inevitably. Although the existence of speckle may be beneficial to diagnosis if used by a well-trained observer, it often causes disturbance which negatively affects clinical diagnosis, not only by reducing resolution and contrast of ultrasound images, but also by adding difficulties to recognize tumor region accurately. In this paper, we investigate a number of popular de-speckling algorithms, including filters based on frequency domain, filters based on local statistical properties, filters based on minimum mean square error (MMSE), and filters based on Partial Differential Equation (PDE). Two visual measurement evaluation criteria, i.e., Mean to Variance Ratio (VMR) and Laplace Response of Domain (LRD), are chosen for the performance comparison of those filters in the application of ultrasound breast image filtering. Moreover, the filtering effect is further evaluated with respect to the segmentation accuracy of tumor regions. According to the evaluation results, we conclude that Bilateral Filter (BF) achieves the best visual effect. Although Weickert J Diffusion (WJD) and Total Variation (TV) can also obtain good visual effect and segmentation accuracy, they are very time-consuming.