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Ultrasound Images, Speckle Noise, Edge Preservation, Performance Evaluation, Gabor Filter.

Ultrasound (US) imaging is an important medical diagnostic method, as it allows the examination of several internal body organs. However, its usefulness is diminished by signal dependent noise known as speckle noise. Speckle noise degrades target detectability in ultrasound images and reduces contrast and resolution, affecting the ability to identify normal and pathological tissue. For accurate diagnosis, it is important to remove this noise from ultrasound images. In this study, a new filtering technique is proposed for removing speckle noise from medical ultrasound images. It is based on Gabor filtering. Specifically, a preprocessing step is added before applying the Gabor filter. The proposed technique is applied to various ultrasound images, and certain measurement indexes are calculated, such as signal to noise ratio, peak signal to noise ratio, structure similarity index, and root mean square error, which are used for comparison. In particular, five widely used image enhancement techniques were applied to three types of ultrasound images (kidney, abdomen and ortho). The main objective of image enhancement is to obtain a highly detailed image, and in that respect, the proposed technique proved superior to other widely used filters.