A wavelet thresholding method to reduce ultrasound artifacts

Artifacts due to enhancement, reverberation, and multi-path reflection are commonly encountered in medical ultrasound imaging. These artifacts can adversely affect an automated image quantification algorithm or interfere with a physician’s assessment of a radiological image. This paper proposes a soft wavelet thresholding method to replace regions adversely affected by these artifacts with the texture due to the underlying tissue(s), which were originally obscured. Our proposed method soft thresholds the wavelet coefficients of affected regions to estimate the reflectivity values caused by these artifacts. By subtracting the estimated reflectivity values of the artifacts from the original reflectivity values, estimates of artifact reduced reflectivity values are attained. The improvements of our proposed method are substantiated by an evaluation of Field II simulated, in vivo mouse and human heart B mode images.