Comparative analysis of filtering techniques for ultrasound images of bone fracture

Ultrasound imaging is one of the imaging techniques that commonly used in the medical imaging beside x-ray, MRI and CT scan. It is a technique that provides noninvasive, nondestructive and also low cost for imaging. However, ultrasound imaging will afford images with a speckle noise which make the images unclear and this is a failing of ultrasound. Therefore, to enhance the ultrasound images of long bone fracture, a study was carried out and it involved contrast enhancement of the image using filtering techniques such as Average, Median and Wiener Filters for the speckle reduction. The level of improvement obtained through these three filtering techniques is discussed in this paper. Amongst the three techniques, the Wiener Filtering is a better technique in reducing the speckle without fully eliminating the image edges. It was found through visual inspection and histogram analysis.