  During the last decades, the number of new full-reference image quality
assessment algorithms has been increasing drastically. Yet, despite of the
remarkable progress that has been made, the medical ultrasound image similarity
measurement remains largely unsolved due to a high level of speckle noise
contamination. Potential applications of the ultrasound image similarity
measurement seem evident in several aspects. To name a few, ultrasound imaging
quality assessment, abnormal function region detection, etc. In this paper, a
comparative study was made on full-reference image quality assessment methods
for ultrasound image visual structural similarity measure. Moreover, based on
the image similarity index, a generic ultrasound motion tracking
re-initialization framework is given in this work. The experiments are
conducted on synthetic data and real-ultrasound liver data and the results
demonstrate that, with proposed similarity-based tracking re-initialization,
the mean error of landmarks tracking can be decreased from 2 mm to about 1.5 mm
in the ultrasound liver sequence.
