Speckle Reduction of Ultrasound Elastography with Bilateral Filter

Ultrasound elastography has been well applied in early tumor diagnosis for obtaining tissue stiffness information. Elastograpyy may provide useful clinical information for the tissue characterization. But ultrasonic wave interference will produce speckle in both phase and envelope. So in conventional ultrasound elastography, there are noise artifacts which produce some misdiagnosis. In this paper, we investigate bilateral filter de-noising method to reduce the speckle. Because the bilateral filter de-noising method can greatly smooth the speckle at the same time protect the lesion edge well, it has been well proved good impact in B-mode. But in ultrasound elastography, the bilateral filter hasn't been used. So we use the bilateral filter to reduce artifacts to prove the performance of this method. In the experiment, because of the bilateral filter de-noising method, the noise artifacts will be reduced largely. We use SNRe and CNRe to verify the performance of the bilateral filter and finally this method proved a significant improvement to SNRe and CNRe.