Ultrafast Online Clutter Filtering for Ultrasound Microvascular Imaging

Spatiotemporal clutter filtering via robust principal component analysis (rPCA) has been widely used in ultrasound microvascular imaging. However, the performance of the rPCA clutter filtering highly relies on low-rank modeling for tissue signals and sparse modeling for blood flow signals. Moreover, current rPCA clutter filters are typically based on static processing and have to access a batch of beamformed frames for optimization. This prevents these filters from ultrafast realization. This paper adopts the iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) rPCA framework to model tissue and blood flow signals for improved clutter filtering. More importantly, the static IRLS-rPCA filter is upgraded to a spatiotemporal-constrained online method to instantaneously extract blood flow signals from the ongoing beamformed frame. Simulations and in-vivo experiments on a contrast-enhanced rat kidney and a contrast-free human liver demonstrated that the IRLS-rPCA clutter filter achieves higher sensitivity, contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than other rPCA methods. Particularly, the static IRLS-rPCA clutter filter obtains more than 2 dB improvements in CNR over the compared methods in the human liver dataset. The proposed online clutter filter achieves comparable image quality to the static version and processing time of $0.028~\pm ~0.004$ seconds per frame. The corresponding acceleration factor of the online clutter filter over all the tested methods is more than 20.