Scoping Review of Recent Trends and Challenges in Artificial Intelligence Based Medical Ultrasound Denoising

(1) Background: Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely used in clinical diagnosis but is often degraded by speckle noise, which reduces image quality and can hinder interpretation. Deep learning has emerged as a promising approach for US denoising, yet its clinical applicability remains unclear. (2) Methods: A systematic review of studies published in the last three years on deep learning-based US denoising was conducted following PRISMA-DTA guidelines. Searches were performed in IEEE-Xplore, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Data were extracted on Anatomy, noise type, learning paradigm, network architecture, datasets, evaluation metrics, and performance outcomes. (3) Results: from 951 records scrapped, 36 studies were included. Most focused-on breast, fetal, cardiac, and abdominal US. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), particularly U-Net, were the most common approach, while GANs, transformers, and variational autoencoders were less explored. Reported PSNR ranged from 30-45 dB and SSIM from 0.85-0.97. Most studies (34 out of 36) relied on synthetic noise and paired datasets, with limited evaluation on real clinical images. (4) Conclusions: CNN-based methods dominate US denoising research, but translation to clinical practice is limited due to reliance on synthetic data and inconsistent evaluation metrics. Future work should focus on large benchmark datasets and standardized metrics to improve generalizability across clinical settings.