Name a technique to reduce speckle in ultrasound images?

• A. Increasing image brightness
• B. Spatial compounding, frequency compounding, or advanced filtering
• C. Increasing transducer frequency only
• D. Reducing frame rate

Answer: (B)

Speckle comes from the interference of many scattered echoes, so the goal is to reduce that interference pattern without losing real tissue details. Spatial compounding helps by acquiring images from multiple angles and averaging them; the speckle pattern isn’t the same in each view, so averaging reduces the graininess while edges remain visible. Frequency compounding uses different transmit or receive frequencies and combines the results, which decorrelates the speckle texture and lowers noise while preserving or improving resolution. Advanced filtering, such as adaptive or wavelet-based approaches, suppresses speckle by adapting to local image statistics, smoothing uniform areas but preserving boundaries. In contrast, simply increasing brightness, raising transducer frequency alone, or lowering the frame rate does not target the speckle pattern and can degrade other aspects of image quality.