Real-time Parallelized Hybrid Median Filter for speckle removal in ultrasound images

Medical Imaging has historically been very successful to expose the patient's anatomy beyond external visibility; thus, allowing more efficient and accurate treatments. The field of medicine continues to search for new techniques in order to increase accuracy, reduce complications, enable real-time feedback, allow early detection and reduce human errors. Various medical imaging techniques exist but suffer from multiple correlated noise or performance that hinders real-time application; ie, ultrasounds. Our contribution attempts to solve both of these problems efficiently to be enable real-time procedures Our work is based on the hybrid median filter. We implemented Parallelized Hybrid Median Filter on FPGA Virtex6 in order to be able to exploit parallelism and real-time capabilities. We were able to get the desirable visual results for experts at 382MHz frequency with 150μs completion time for full 512×512 ultrasound image to complete despeckle.

I. Introduction

New, non-curable, late diagnosed or high fatality rate diseases have prompted researchers and the medical industry to look for new techniques to be able to assure better health care for patients. Medicine has been very dependent on Ultrasound images since the 20th century for its noninvasive, harmless and cost effective features [1]. Unfortunately, the quality of ultrasound B-scan image is corrupted with system-dependent granular distortions called speckle. Speckle is multiplicative noise that can mask small or low contrast lesions corrupting medical ultrasound imaging causing diagnostic problem; such as, early detection of cancerous lesions.