Comparison of despeckle filters for endometrial ultrasound images

Endometrial cancer is a type of cancer in women. Diagnosis of the cancer can be made via ultrasound imaging. Ultrasound imaging is one of the essential methods for noninvasive medical diagnosis. However, speckle noise reduces the quality of the ultrasound image by reducing contrast-to-noise ratio and it also affects image interpretation by doctor. Thus, despeckle is critical phase in pre-processing of ultrasound images. Many speckle noise reduction filters has been designed by the researchers, but it has not been a detailed study on endometrial ultrasound images. In this study, PMAD, SRAD, DPAD and PPB filters are tested on endometrial ultrasound images to reduce speckle noise. NIQE image quality metrics that does not need noise free reference image were computed in order to determine which despeckling algorithm is most effective and experimental results have been demonstrated.