Denoising Of Intravascular Ultrasound Images: A Comparative Study

The major objective of the image Enhancement techniques is to emphasize & sharpen the features of images for better display & investigation. Medical images are affected by the Mixed Noise, which is the combination of Speckle & Gaussian Noise. Mixed Noise is an inherent property of Intravascular Ultrasound Imaging (IVUS) & it is generally tends to deteriorate the image quality, thereby reducing the diagnostic value of this medical imaging modality. As a result the noise reduction filtering is considered to be an important & essential procedure to be used, whenever IVUS image is used for atherosclerotic lesions assessment. In this paper, wiener filtering is used to reduce the mixed noise in IVUS Image. This method reduces the noise & hence the quality of the image is enhanced. Experimental results show a significant improvement in removing the mixed noise present in the IVUS Image by giving better PSNR & MSE values. Keywords—Image Enhancement, Mixed Noise, Speckle Noise, Gaussian Noise, Wiener Filter, PSNR, MSE. I. IMPORTANCE OF ULTRASOUND IMAGING Image denoising is a procedure in digital image processing aiming at the removal of noise, which may corrupt an image during its acquisition or transmission, while retaining its quality. Image denoising still remains the challenge for researchers because noise removal introduces artifacts and causes blurring of the images. Medical ultrasonography is one of the popular techniques for imaging diagnosis and is preferred over other medical imaging modalities because it is noninvasive, portable and does not provide any harmful radiations. The disadvantage of ultrasonography is the poor quality of images, which is due to the presence of Mixed Noise.[8] I