Reduction of the speckle noise in echocardiographic images by a cubic spline filter

One of the main problems to resolve in the processing of biomedical images is the reduction of noise. The problem is specially important if the noise has a multiplicative nature (speckle noise), for instance if the object of analysis is an ultrasonic image. In this report we carry out a review of techniques which can be used to reduce this type of noise on four-chamber view B-mode echocardiographic images in an appropriated way. Different ways of nonlinear filtering, adaptive techniques based on the statistical ordering and a cubic spline interpolation will be shown as suitable techniques for this objective but regarding quantitative and qualitative results we have obtained, we can confirm that a cubic spline filter is the most suitable filter that we have reviewed.