Comparative Analysis of Anisotropic Diffusion and Non Local Means on Ultrasound Images

Applications of Ultrasound in examining physical health of patient are continuously expanding over last few decades. Ultrasound imaging has assisted doctors in the diagnosis of medical health of patient in obstetrics, cardiology, gynaecology, musculoskeletal, urology and others. It has proved to be very promising and considerably advantageous over other imaging methods because of its features like non-invasive nature, use of non-ionizing radiation, portability, rapidity in performance, ease and cheap availability, real time imaging capability, high patient acceptability. Despite many advantages, it suffers from Speckle noise which results in affecting image resolution and contrast making an adverse impact on the diagnostic capability of the imaging modality. In this paper, we attempt to remove speckle noise from musculoskeletal ultrasound image for shoulder application using Anisotropic Diffusion and Non-Local Means (NLM) method. The quantitative analysis of the result is done using measurement indexes such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), signal to noise ratio (SNR) and root mean square error (RMSE), whereas, visual inspection is carried out for qualitative analysis. Journal of Machine to Machine Communications, Vol. 1 , 51–68. doi: 10.13052/jmmc2246-137X.115 c © 2014 River Publishers. All rights reserved. 52 Rishu Gupta et.al