International Journal of Measurement Technologies and Instrumentation Engineering, 5(1), 1-14, January-June 2015 1 Copyright © 2015, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Keywords: Blocks Processing, Hard and Soft Thresholding, Speckle Noise, Ultrasound Medical Imaging, Wavelet Transform ABSTRACT Medical ultrasound imaging has revolutioned the diagnostics of human body in the last few decades. The major drawback of ultrasound medical images is speckle noise. Speckle noise in ultrasound images is because of multiple reflections of ultrasound waves from hard tissues. Speckle noise degrades the medical ultrasound images lessening the visible quality of the image. The aim of this paper is to improve the image quality of ultrasound medical images by applying block based hard and soft thresholding on wavelet coefficients. Medical ultrasound image transformation to wavelet domain uses debauchee’s mother wavelet. Divide the approximate and detailed coefficients into uniform blocks of size 8×8, 16×16, 32×32 and 64×64. Hard and soft threshold- ing on these blocks of approximate and detailed coefficients reduces speckle noise. Inverse transformation to original spatial domain produces a noise reduced ultrasound image. Experiments on medical ultrasound images obtained from diagnostic centers in Vijayawada, India show good improvements to ultrasound images visually. Quality of improved images in measured using peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), image quality index (IQI), structural similarity index (SSIM). Denoising Ultrasound Medical Images: A Block based Hard and Soft Thresholding in Wavelet Domain A.S.C.S.Sastry, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, K.L. University, Andhra Pradesh, India P.V.V.Kishore MIEE, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, K.L. University, Andhra Pradesh, India Ch.Raghava Prasad, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, K.L. University, Andhra Pradesh, India M.V.D.Prasad, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, K.L. University, Andhra Pradesh, India 1. INTRODUCTION Medical ultrasound imaging (Hennersperger, Baust., Waelkens, Karamalis, Ahmadi & Navab, 2014) ;(Rabinovich, Friedman & Feuer, 2013);(Anquez, Angelini, Grange & Bloch, 2013) is extensively used to diagnostics of internal human body parts invasively. Ultrasound imaging tool has been cost-effective, portable and time saving. Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic DOI: 10.4018/IJMTIE.2015010101