Adaptive clutter rejection for ultrasound color doppler imaging of lower extremity blood flow: Preliminary results

In this paper, the adaptive clutter rejection (ACR) method, in which an optimum clutter filter is dynamically selected at each location based on clutter power and instantaneous velocities, is applied to effectively remove flash artifacts during the assessment of deep venous thrombosis (DVT). To evaluate the ACR method, the in vivo data were acquired from an ultrasound machine by moving a 9-MHz linear array probe distally along the politeal vein of a volunteer. The ACR method was compared with the conventional static clutter rejection (CON) and down-mixing (DM) methods in terms of flow-signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) for 80 frames. The ACR method provides 8.5 dB and 11.4 dB improvements in SCR compared to the DM and CON methods, respectively.