Image quality evaluation of ultrasound images using computer simulation

Abstract

Image quality, for scientific and medical purposes is defined as how well the desired information can be extracted from the image thus the principal research goal in medical imaging is the development of data acquisition and reconstruction procedures that can produce consistently good clinical images to be able to make precise and accurate diagnoses. Parallel to other imaging modalities, ultrasound imaging made also massive breakthroughs in the last decade in terms of its image quality and archiving modalities abnormalities in the body are better observed with a region specific ultrasound probe, which works within a certain frequency border and the images yielded are subjected to certain filters to remove the noise, blur or clock that arise because of reasons such as body fat, location of the lesion or minor malfunctions in the hardware etc. For diseases with long term follow-up, the images are compressed and stored, for being able to examine later on or some images obtained in a distant part of the world are transmitted via internet for telemedicine applications. This work intends to make an evaluation of medical images, using real and simulated ultrasound images compressed via lossy algorithms, to examine the feasibility of a simulation procedure for assessing compression algorithms, to investigate the performance of those and to make comparisons between the different sources of errors and the compression errors that effect the image quality.|Keywords: Image compression, ultrasound image quality, computer simulation