Real-time parallelized hybrid median filter for speckle removal in ultrasound images

Abstract

Medical Imaging has historically been very successful to expose the patient's anatomy beyond external visibility; thus, allowing more efficient and accurate treatments. The field of medicine continues to search for new techniques in order to increase accuracy, reduce complications, enable real-time feedback, allow early detection and reduce human errors. Various medical imaging techniques exist but suffer from multiple correlated noise or performance that hinders real-time application; ie, ultrasounds. Our contribution attempts to solve both of these problems efficiently to be enable real-time procedures Our work is based on the hybrid median filter. We implemented Parallelized Hybrid Median Filter on FPGA Virtex6 in order to be able to exploit parallelism and real-time capabilities. We were able to get the desirable visual results for experts at 382MHz frequency with 150μs completion time for full 512×512 ultrasound image to complete despeckle.