A New Despeckling Method in Ultrasonography: Anisotropic Diffusion Filtering Followed by Total Variation Denoising

This paper proposes a novel hybrid method to reduce speckle noise in ultrasonography. This method applies the total variation denoising algorithm to the output image of a recently reported anisotropic diffusion filter. Performance of the proposed method is illustrated using simulated and clinical images. Experimental results indicate the proposed method outperforms the existing despeckling schemes in terms of both speckle reduction and edge preservation.