Selection of a Stopping Criterion for AD Filtering in

Ultrasound Images

Javier Guillen Ibarra1; Sonia Contreras Ortiz PhD1

1Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar

Abstract
Ultrasound imaging is a safe and cost-effective diagnostic tool, but the
quality of the images is affected by speckle noise and artifacts. Anisotropic
diffusion filters can be used to reduce noise and preserve the edges in the
image. However, this technique is very sensitive to the number of iterations
selected.
This work proposes a stopping criterion for effective noise removal without
blurring the edges, based on the relative variance between the estimated
denoised image and the original one. Different quality metrics were
evaluated in 25 test images. The results suggest that the proposed stopping
criterion can be implemented efficiently and aids in the process of
automation of the filter.

1. Introduction
Echocardiography is one of the most used medical diagnostic techniques. It
provides information on the shape, size, function, and strength of the heart;
movement and thickness of its walls; and activity of heart valves in real
time. However, the value of echocardiograms depends on the examiner’s
skill. Ultrasound images have speckle noise, which hinder areas of interest,
and difficult accurate measurements.
Anisotropic diffusion filters are commonly used in medical image
enhancement. They are effective to reduce noise in homogeneous regions
without blurring the edges by preventing intra-region smoothing. As
anisotropic diffusion is an iterative method, it is important to determine the
best time to stop the process. In this paper we propose a stopping criterion
for anisotropic diffusion that uses the relation between the variance of the
filtered image and the original one.

3. Image quality metrics 2. Filter design

Three metrics were used to quantify the filter’s Fig. (A) shows the template of 12 neighboring
performance and the image quality in each iteration. They pixels.
all calculated in a homogeneous region, this one was
chosen manually, before the start of the filtering algorithm,
from an input pixel inside a region of interest of the image.
In this work, the size of the homogeneous region for all
images was chosen as 21x21 pixels.
• Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
• Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)
• Universal quality index (Q)

4. Stopping criterion
We defined a minimum improvement in SNR of 2. It means
𝑡 𝑡 𝑡
that the relative variance should be less than or equal to 𝐼𝑖,𝑗 = 𝐼𝑖,𝑗 +𝜆 𝑐𝑛 ⋅ ∇𝑛 𝐼𝑖,𝑗
0.25. Therefore, we selected a value of 0.2 for the relative
variance as stopping criterion:
Where 𝑐𝑛 and ∇𝑛 are the directional derivatives
and the diffusion coefficients for each direction
var 𝐼 𝑡 respectively.
𝑟 𝐼𝑇 = = 0.2
var 𝐼 0
5. Experiments and results

Fig. (B) shows the convergence curve of the proposed

stopping criterion for three different images.

Conclusions
The performance of the AD filter depends on the structure
and the selected stopping time. We proposed a simple,
effective and computationally efficient stopping criterion
based on the desired improvement in SNR. We evaluated
the method with 25 ultrasound images and the results are
similar to other criteria in the literature. Future work
includes the validation of the proposed method with a
larger database of images, the use of other metrics to
evaluate the quality of edges during the process.

Simulated and real ultrasound images before and after the diffusion filtering. Fig. (C)
is the original images. Fig. (D) is the processed images considering the stopping
criterion, the filter stops when t = T. Fig. (E) is the overestimated filtered images with
t >> T.

Contact References
Javier Enrique Guillen Ibarra 1. Loizou, Christos P y Constantinos S Pattichis. Despeckle filtering algorithms and software
Email: jv.guilen@hotmail.com for ultrasound imaging. Synthesis Lectures on Algorithms and Software in Engineering.
Morgan y Claypool Publishers, 2008.
Twitter: @JVGuillen0528 2. Deepti Mittal, Vinod Kumar, Suresh Chandra Saxena, Niranjan Khandelwal, and Naveen
Phone: +57 318 8428206 Kalra. Enhancement of the ultrasound images by modified anisotropic diffusion method.
Medical & biological engineering & computing, 48(12):1281–1291, 2010.
3. Joachim Weickert. Coherence-enhancing diffusion of colour images. Image and Vision
Computing, 17(3- 4):201–212, 1999.