Echocardiogram Image Quality Enhancement using Upsampling and Histogram Matching Methods

Abstract

The prevalence of heart disease has been increasing in the last ten years. One of the cardiac diagnostic tools is echocardiography. Echocardiogram medical images provide essential information, including shape, size, pumping capacity, heart function abnormalities, and location of heart damage, but echocardiogram images have high noise content and poor contrast, as well as limitations due to differences in anatomy or body mass. This will affect the reading results of patient diagnosis. Therefore, image quality improvement is needed by removing noise and increasing image contrast. This research has improved image quality using a method with low mathematical complexity and a fast computational process. The method used is the Upsampling method to generate a reference image. The quality of the image produced was the Nearest Neighbor upsampling method: 2.8 dB, Bi-linear Interpolation: 2.78 dB, and Bi-cubic Interpolation: 2.73 dB. Furthermore, the image with the highest SNR value is processed with Histogram Matching to accelerate improving image quality. The Histogram Matching image increases quality by more than 50% with a SSIM value of 0.54. The required computational process to apply this method to each medical image has an average duration of 0.4 s. This result provides a higher value than several methods using linear scaling and speckle reducing.

Keywords

• echocardiogram
• histogram matching
• image contrast
• upsampling