FPGA-based real-time anisotropic diffusion filtering of 3D ultrasound images

Three-dimensional ultrasonic imaging, especially the emerging real-time version of it, is particularly valuable in medical applications such as echocardiography, obstetrics and surgical navigation. A known problem with ultrasound images is their high level of speckle noise. Anisotropic diffusion filtering has been shown to be effective in enhancing the visual quality of 3D ultrasound images and as preprocessing prior to advanced image processing. However, due to its arithmetic complexity and the sheer size of 3D ultrasound images, it is not possible to perform online, real-time anisotropic diffusion filtering using standard software implementations. We present an FPGA-based architecture that allows performing anisotropic diffusion filtering of 3D images at acquisition rates, thus enabling the use of this filtering technique in real-time applications, such as visualization, registration and volume rendering.