YOU Wei WANG Yuanyuan

(Department of Electronic Engineering, Fudan University Shanghai 200433)

Received  Feb. 19, 2009

Revised  Apr. 1, 2009

Abstract A clutter rejection method based on the projection-pursuit (PP) was proposed to reduce velocity artifacts caused by clutter signals in the ultrasound color flow imaging (CFI).Principal components are extracted by the PP to reduce their sensitivity to strong clutter signals originating from non-blood-flow regions. Then blood signals are obtained by removing the estimated clutter space in the eigenvector domain. Computer simulations and in vivo experiments are carried out to validate the proposed method. Results show that compared with conventional high-pass filter (HPF), this method can achieve a better velocity profile and vessel shape. It is also shown that this method causes less velocity artifacts in non-blood-flow regions than the eigenvector filter and achieves a higher inside-to-outside blood energy ratio by 5 dB. Therefore, this approach is expected to be an effective clutter rejection algorithm to improve the image quality in the ultrasound CFI.

PACS numbers: 43.35,43.60