%0 Journal Article
	%A Ahmed Badawi and  J. Michael Johnson and  Mohamed Mahfouz
	%D 2007
	%J International Journal of Medical and Health Sciences
	%B World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
	%I Open Science Index 5, 2007
	%T Scatterer Density in Edge and Coherence Enhancing Nonlinear Anisotropic Diffusion for Medical Ultrasound Speckle Reduction
	%U https://publications.waset.org/pdf/9443
	%V 5
	%X This paper proposes new enhancement models to the
methods of nonlinear anisotropic diffusion to greatly reduce speckle
and preserve image features in medical ultrasound images. By
incorporating local physical characteristics of the image, in this case
scatterer density, in addition to the gradient, into existing tensorbased
image diffusion methods, we were able to greatly improve the
performance of the existing filtering methods, namely edge
enhancing (EE) and coherence enhancing (CE) diffusion. The new
enhancement methods were tested using various ultrasound images,
including phantom and some clinical images, to determine the
amount of speckle reduction, edge, and coherence enhancements.
Scatterer density weighted nonlinear anisotropic diffusion
(SDWNAD) for ultrasound images consistently outperformed its
traditional tensor-based counterparts that use gradient only to weight
the diffusivity function. SDWNAD is shown to greatly reduce
speckle noise while preserving image features as edges, orientation
coherence, and scatterer density. SDWNAD superior performances
over nonlinear coherent diffusion (NCD), speckle reducing
anisotropic diffusion (SRAD), adaptive weighted median filter
(AWMF), wavelet shrinkage (WS), and wavelet shrinkage with
contrast enhancement (WSCE), make these methods ideal
preprocessing steps for automatic segmentation in ultrasound
imaging.
	%P 333 - 356