Ultrasound Image Processing

Ultrasound has been widely used in medical diagnostic and therapeutic. This is due to the safety, easiness and cost of this modality application. The existing ultrasound machine is able to visualize the human tissue as acoustic function in 4-dimension. This enables the fetus movement analysis during third trimester pregnancy. However, the dependency of operator causes difficulties to obtain the standard diagnostic image. Manual ultrasound marker measurements are easily prone to human error. The in-homogeneity of human tissue causes the noise of ultrasound image. In cases of low end ultrasound machine application, the images qualities are getting worse due to speckle noise. This book, therefore, provides the basic physics of ultrasound medical imaging. Image processing techniques covered from data acquisition, pre-processing, speckle noise reduction and segmentation are introduced. Several clinical applications of ultrasound image processing are described using Matlab programming implementation. This should be especially useful for students, lecturers or professional researchers in biomedical and image processing fields.