An Advanced Filter Adaptive to Non-Stationary Clutter in Ultrasonic Color Flow Imaging

Traditional clutter rejection methods are based on the hypothesis that the clutter signal originates from stationary or moving tissue with a constant velocity, and they are not valid when there exists considerable acceleration of tissue motion. In this paper, we propose an advanced clutter filter adapted to accelerated tissue motion. It uses the instantaneous frequency to realize the DC remove, and uses the bandwidth of the clutter signal to choose the cutoff frequency of the wall filter, Simulation shows this advanced adaptive filter can efficiently attenuate the non-stationary clutter signals and improves the accuracy and the flexibility of the blood flow estimation.