Speckle Reduction in Pulse-Echo Images by Using Phase Insensitive Summation and Multiplicative Techniques

The speckle appearance of images in pulse-echo scans often reduces the diagnostic potential of the technique. Considerable speckle reduction is being achieved for large aperture transducers by cutting them into sectors, and smoothing out the fluctuations by using phase-insensitive sector-addition (PISA) or a multiplicative signal processing technique. It appears that a simple real-time PISA processing can be the method used effectively to improve the image quality for a practical scanner.