Liver Ultrasound Image Analysis using Enhancement Techniques

Liver cancer is the sixth most common malignant tumour and the third most common cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Chronic Liver damage affects up to 20% of our population. It has many causes - viral infections (Hepatitis B and C), toxins, genetic, metabolic and autoimmune diseases. The rate of liver cancer in Australia has increased four-fold in the past 20 years. For detection and qualitative diagnosis of liver diseases, Ultrasound (US) image is an easy-to-use and minimally invasive imaging modality. Medical images are often deteriorated by noise due to various sources of interferences and other phenomena known as Speckle noise. Therefore it is required to apply some digital image processing techniques for smoothing or suppression of speckle noise in ultrasound images. This paper attempts to undertake the study three types of the image enhancement techniques including, Shock Filter, Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) and Spatial filter. These smoothing techniques are compared using performance matrices Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Square Error (MSE). It has been observed that the Spatial high pass filter gives the better performance than others for liver ultrasound image analysis.