New adaptive clutter rejection for ultrasound color Doppler imaging: in vivo study

Clutter rejection is essential for accurate flow estimation in ultrasound color Doppler imaging. In this article, we present a new adaptive clutter rejection (ACR) technique where an optimum filter is dynamically selected depending upon the underlying clutter characteristics (e.g., tissue acceleration and power). We compared the performance of the ACR method with other adaptive methods, i.e., down-mixing (DM) and adaptive clutter filtering (ACF), using in vivo data acquired from the kidney, liver and common carotid artery. With the kidney data, the ACR method provided an average improvement of 3.05 dB and 1.7 dB in flow signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) compared with DM and ACF, respectively. With the liver data, SCR was improved by 2.75 dB and 1.8 dB over DM and ACF while no significant improvement with ACR was found in the common carotid artery data. Thus, the proposed adaptive method could provide more accurate flow estimation by improving clutter rejection in abdominal ultrasound color Doppler imaging pending validation.