Filter bank approach to clutter filtering in ultrasound imaging

Abstract

In this paper, a novel filter bank approach is presented in order to improve clutter filtering performance in ultrasound color flow imaging. In ultrasound imaging, clutter signals are characterized as the ones with low frequencies and large energies, which is quite qualitative but not quantitative. So, it is not easy to design a fixed optimal filter to handle general situations. In this paper, a novel filter bank is adopted for clutter filtering. In order to choose an optimal filtering result among the filters consisting of a filter bank, a new performance measure for good filtering is introduced. Through computer simulations for heart ultrasound data, the performance of the proposed filter bank approach is evaluated. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.