A new robust and computationally efficient adaptive clutter filtering

In the diagnostic ultrasound system, a precise estimation of blood velocity requires a better removal of the clutter´s influence. Adaptive clutter filtering has been researched for this purpose and recently, eigen-based clutter filtering methods are mainly researched. However, these methods have a drawback of a large amount of computational requirement to be applied to mid-to-low cost systems. In consideration of this point, a new adaptive clutter filtering method is presented in this paper. This new method is based on clutter down-mixing and the down mixing frequency is determined by 2^nd order AR (autoregressive) model so that performance is improved from conventional down mixing method. The performance of the proposed method is verified through computer simulations. Two sorts of input signals are used for simulation, one from generated RF data using Field II and another is RF acquisition data obtained from actual system. Resultant images show that performance of the proposed method is not far behind eigen-based clutter filtering.