JIN Dawei  WANG Yuanyuan  WANG Weiqi 

(Department of Electronic Engineering, Fudan University Shanghai 200433)

Received Jul. 27, 2006

Revised Sept. 21, 2006

Abstract  In medical Doppler ultrasound systems, a high-pass filter which is usually employed to filter wall clutter components, will remove the information of the low velocity blood flow. To extract intact Doppler ultrasound blood signals, a novel approach is proposed based on the spatially selective noise filtration. The wall signals are firstly estimated by the spatially selective noise filtration from wavelet spatial correlation property. Then the wall clutters are exactly obtained by a wavelet threshold de-noising technique which eliminates the residual blood flow signals. Finally the intact blood flow signals are achieved by subtracting the wall signals from the mixed signals. This approach is applied to both computer simulated and in vivo carotid Doppler ultrasound signals. The experiment results show that the wavelet space based approach can exactly extract the blood flow signals, and achieve about 45% lower results in the mean absolute error than that of the high-pass filtering. This approach is expected to be an effective method to remove the wall clutters in Doppler ultrasound systems.

PACS number: 43.35, 43.60