# EdgeSRIE: A hybrid deep learning framework for real-time speckle reduction and image enhancement on portable ultrasound systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03937 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03937/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Efficient Deep Learning: A Survey on Making Deep Learning Models Smaller, Faster, and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08962/) (2021)
- [Deep Coherence Learning: An Unsupervised Deep Beamformer for High Quality Single Plane Wave Imaging in Medical Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11169/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speckle patterns in ultrasound images often obscure anatomical details, leading to diagnostic uncertainty. Recently, various deep learning (DL)-based techniques have been introduced to effectively suppress speckle; however, their high computational costs pose challenges for low-resource devices, such as portable ultrasound systems. To address this issue, EdgeSRIE, which is a lightweight hybrid DL framework for real-time speckle reduction and image enhancement in portable ultrasound imaging, is introduced. The proposed framework consists of two main branches: an unsupervised despeckling branch, which is trained by minimizing a loss function between speckled images, and a deblurring branch, which restores blurred images to sharp images. For hardware implementation, the trained network is quantized to 8-bit integer precision and deployed on a low-resource system-on-chip (SoC) with limited power consumption. In the performance evaluation with phantom and in vivo analyses, EdgeSRIE achieved the highest contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and average gradient magnitude (AGM) compared with the other baselines (different 2-rule-based methods and other 4-DL-based methods). Furthermore, EdgeSRIE enabled real-time inference at over 60 frames per second while satisfying computational requirements (< 20K parameters) on actual portable ultrasound hardware. These results demonstrated the feasibility of EdgeSRIE for real-time, high-quality ultrasound imaging in resource-limited environments.
