Interactive 3D filter design for ultrasound artifact reduction

A method for detecting and reducing reverberation artifacts in ultrasound image sequences is described. A reverberation artifact localization map is produced using local Rf-bandwidth estimation. To reduce the artifacts an ideal 3D (2D + time) Wiener filter function is computed by using the reverberation map to interactively produce an estimate of the noise and signal spectra. The Wiener filter kernel is optimized to obtain good locality properties. The optimized filter is then applied to the ultrasound image sequence. The test sequence used is from an open chest pig heart, corrupted by strong reverberation artifacts. The selective power of a 3D filter is far superior to that of ID and 2D filters and the reverberation artifacts are almost completely removed by the developed method.