Speckle Reduction in Ultrasound Images of the Common Carotid Artery Based on Integer and Fractional-Order Total Variation

Designing a technique with higher speckle noise suppressing capability, better edge preserving performance, and lower time complexity is a research objective for the common carotid artery (CCA) ultrasound despeckling. Total variation based techniques have been widely used in the image denoising and have good performance in preserving the edges in the images. However, the total variation based filters can produce the staircase artifacts. To address this issue, second-order total variation based techniques have been proposed for the image denoising. However, the previous study has been proved that the fractional differential model has better performance in reducing the speckles in ultrasound despeckling compared with the second-order model. Thus, to improve the performance of ultrasound despeckling and edge preserving, a novel despeckling model based on integer and fractional-order total variation (IFOTV) is proposed for CCA ultrasound images. Moreover, the minimization problems in our despeckling model are solved by the alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM). In results with synthetic images, the edge preservation index (EPI) values of proposed method are 0.9524, 0.8797, and 0.7351 as well as 0.9137, 0.8253, and 0.6847 under three different levels of noise, which are the highest among four advanced methods. In results with simulated CCA ultrasound images, the speckle suppression and mean preservation indices of proposed method are 0.5596, 0.6571, and 0.8106 under three different levels of noise, which are the best among four advanced methods. In results with clinical images, the average absolute error of intima-media thickness measurements of proposed method is 0.0660 ± 0.0679 (mean ± std in mm), which is the lowest among four advanced methods. In conclusion, the IFOTV method has improved performance in suppressing the speckle noise and preserving the edge, and is thus a potential alternative to the current filters for the CCA ultrasound despeckling.