<title>New clutter-rejection algorithm for Doppler ultrasound</title>

Abstract

Several strategies, known as clutter or wall Doppler filtering, were proposed to remove the strong echoes produced by stationary or slow moving tissue structures from the Doppler blood flow signal. In this study, the matching pursuit (MP) method is proposed to remove clutter components. The MP method decomposes the Doppler signal into wavelet atoms that are selected in a decreasing energy order. Thus, the high-energy clutter components are extracted first. In the present study, the pulsatile Doppler signal s(n) was simulated by a sum of random-phase sinusoids. Two types of high-amplitude clutter signals were then superimposed on s(n): a time-varying low frequency component (type 1), covering systole and early diastole, and short transient clutter signals (type 2), distributed within the whole cardiac cycle. The Doppler signals were modeled with the MP method and the most dominant atoms were subtracted until the signal-to-clutter (S/C) ratio reached a maximum. For the type 1 clutter signal, the improvement in the S/C ratio was 19.0 +/- 0.6 dB, and 72.0 +/- 4.5 atoms were required to reach this performance. For the transient type 2 clutter signal, exactly 10 atoms were required and the maximum improvement in S/C ratio was 5.5 +/- 0.5 dB. These results suggest the possibility of using this signal processing approach to implement clutter rejection filters on ultrasound commercial instruments.