Tissue Flow Detection Based on Fuzzy Logic Processing

A method of tissue/flow detection has been developed for medical ultrasound color flow imaging. For most of ultrasound scanners, the tissue/flow detection is made on the basis of one or more thresholds against which flow parameters received by the ultrasound system are compared. However, this method is inadequate to clearly distinguish blood flow from moving tissue due to the overlap of the numerical ranges of detected parameters. Instead of a clear-cut approach, we presented a fuzzy logic based processing to deal with three flow parameters: flow magnitude, variance and velocity, for tissue/flow detection. Computer simulations and in vivo testing demonstrated that the new method has better performance compared with those using fixed thresholds.