US Patent 7024025 Nonuniform Rotational Distortion (NURD) reduction

A new image processing method reduces Nonuniform Rotational Distortion (NURD) in a medical image acquired using a rotating transducer. The image comprises a plurality of image vectors having texture. In a preferred embodiment, the image processing technique computes an average frequency of the texture for each image vector and estimates an angle for each image vector based on the average frequency for the respective image vector. The image processing technique then corrects for NURD by remapping each image vector to the estimated angle for the respective image vector.