Filtering of medical ultrasonic images based on a modified anistropic diffusion equation

Speckle noise reduction is a key problem of the image analysis of medical UltraSound images. In this paper, two important improvements have been developed to a fast anisotropic diffusion algorithm for speckle noise reduction. The Gaussian filter is firstly used before gradient calculation, and then the adaptive algorithm of the factor k is proposed. Numerous experimental results show that the proposed model is superior to other methods in noise removal, fidelity and edge preservation. It is suitable for the preprocessing of a great number of medical UltraSound images, such as three dimensional reconstruction.