Restoration and enhancement of breast ultrasound images using extended complex diffusion based unsharp masking

Abstract

Ultrasound is a well-known imaging modality for the interpretation of breast cancer. It is playing very important role for breast cancer detection that are missed by mammograms. The image acquisition is usually affected by the presence of noise, artifacts, and distortion. To overcome such type of issues, there is a need of image restoration and enhancement to improve the quality of image. This paper proposes a single framework for denoising and enhancement of ultrasound images, where a smoothing filter is replaced with an extended complex diffusion-based filter in an unsharp masking technique. The performance evaluation of the proposed method is tested on real ultrasound breast cancer images database and synthetic ultrasound image. The performance evaluation comprises qualitative and quantitative evaluation along with comparative analysis of pre-existing and proposed method. The quantitative evaluation metrics are mean squared error, peak-signal-to-noise ratio, correlation parameter, normalized absolute error, universal quality index, similarity structure index, edge preservation index, a measure of enhancement, a measure of enhancement by entropy, and second derivative like measurement. The result specifies that the proposed method is better suited approach for the removal of speckle noise which follows Rayleigh distribution, restoration of information, enhancement of abnormalities, and proper edge preservation.