AN EFFICIENT MEDICAL IMAGE DENOISING ALGORITHM

Noise suppression in medical images is a particularly delicate and difficult task. A trade-offbetween noise reduction and the preservation of actual image features has to be made in a way thatenhances the diagnostically relevant image content. Image processing specialists usually lack thebiomedical expertise to judge the diagnostic relevance of the De-noising results. For example, in ultrasoundimages, speckle noise may contain information useful to medical experts the use of speckled texture for adiagnosis was discussed in. Also biomedical images show extreme variability and it is necessary to operateon a case by case basis. This motivates the construction of robust and Efficient denoising methods that areapplicable to various circumstances, rather than being optimal under very specific conditions. In this paper,we propose one robust method that adapts itself to various types of image noise as well as to the preferenceof the medical expert: a single parameter can be used to balance the preservation of relevant details againstthe degree of noise reduction. The proposed algorithm is simple to implement and fast. We demonstrate itsusefulness for denoising and enhancement of the CT, Ultrasound and Magnetic Resonance images.