Open AccessGabor-based anisotropic diffusion with lattice Boltzmann method for medical ultrasound despeckling
Author(s) -
Haohao Xu,
Yuchen Gong,
Xinyi Xia,
Dong Liu,
Zhuangzhi Yan,
Jun Shi,
Qi Zhang
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
mathematical biosciences and engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.451
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1551-0018
pISSN - 1547-1063
DOI - 10.3934/mbe.2019379
Subject(s) - lattice boltzmann methods , speckle noise , anisotropic diffusion , speckle pattern , computation , anisotropy , computer science , artificial intelligence , ultrasound , noise (video) , diffusion , fractional anisotropy , lattice (music) , algorithm , computer vision , mathematics , pattern recognition (psychology) , diffusion mri , image (mathematics) , physics , optics , acoustics , radiology , medicine , mechanics , magnetic resonance imaging , thermodynamics
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.