A novel clutter rejection scheme in color flow imaging

In ultrasound color flow imaging systems, it is important to suppress the clutter signals originated from stationary and slowly moving tissue sufficiently. Without sufficient clutter rejection, the estimation of the blood flow velocity will be inaccurate, and the imaging quality will be poor. In this paper we present a new clutter rejection scheme involving first down-mixing the clutter signals to zero frequency and then cancelling the stationary echo by subtracting the signals from two consecutive pulses. This stationary echo cancelling scheme is easy to be realized with small computational power, and is adaptive to the clutter signals. Theoretical analysis and simulation using RF data prove that it's an efficient and practical clutter rejection scheme for color flow imaging.