Ultrasound Speckle Reduction Using Coded Excitation and Pulse Compression



Ultrasound images are riddled with system dependent imperfections called speckle (multiplicative noise). In ultrasonic imaging, detection of small lesions could be difficult because the effects of speckle may mask the visibility of these small targets. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to decrease speckle while maintaining some of the key salient features in the image. Images of tissue-mimicking phantoms will be created using Field II [1-2] in MATLAB (Natick, MA). Image quality metrics such as speckle signal-to-noise ratio (sSNR) [3] and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) [4] will be used to quantify improvements in image quality after various despeckling filters have been applied.