Ultrasonic Blood Flow Imaging Clutter Suppression
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Solution Overview
Problem
In ultrasonic diagnostic apparatuses, the existing methods face challenges in accurately imaging blood flow due to saturation issues with strong reflectors, leading to artifacts and incorrect display of blood flow signals, especially when using plane wave transmission with all-raster parallel simultaneous reception, where side lobes from strong reflectors are misinterpreted as blood flow.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of an MTI filter before beam forming, utilizing principal component analysis to remove still or minute-moving signals, and determining signal saturation in each channel to exclude saturated signals from the beam forming process, thereby reducing clutter and artifacts.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If plane wave transmission with all-raster parallel simultaneous reception is used, then high frame rate display and detection of low-speed to high-speed blood flow are achieved, but side lobes from strong reflectors are misinterpreted as blood flow signals causing artifacts
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies an MTI filter before beam forming to preliminarily remove still or minute-moving signals (clutter) from the received signals. This preliminary action prevents strong reflector signals from being misinterpreted as blood flow during subsequent processing, thereby resolving the contradiction between high frame rate capability and accuracy of blood flow display.
2Device complexity
If signal processing is performed without channel saturation detection, then processing simplicity is maintained, but saturated signals cause artifacts and incorrect blood flow display
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary step of detecting channel saturation before beam forming. This detection mechanism identifies which channels have saturated signals, allowing the system to selectively process only valid signals. This intermediary detection prevents artifacts while maintaining reasonable processing complexity.
3Speed
If clutter and side lobes are not suppressed, then processing speed is maintained, but blood flow imaging accuracy deteriorates due to artifacts
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs clutter suppression using MTI filter before beam forming in a preliminary action. This timing allows the system to remove unwanted signals efficiently without adding significant processing overhead to the main blood flow detection pipeline, thereby maintaining processing speed while improving measurement precision.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts and removes clutter and side lobe signals from the received signals before further processing. By taking out these harmful components preliminarily, the system prevents them from interfering with blood flow detection while maintaining efficient processing of the remaining valid signals.
Applied Scientific Principles
This section explains which scientific principles are used to turn an abstract innovation direction into a practical engineering solution.
Function Achieved in This Case
This approach effectively reduces artifacts caused by strong reflectors, improves the accuracy of blood flow imaging by suppressing clutter and side lobes, and ensures that only valid blood flow signals are displayed, enhancing the diagnostic quality.
Implementation Method 1
an ultrasonic probe 11 to transmit and receive ultrasonic waves
Implementation Method 2
filter processing circuitry performs a filter process of removing a still or minute-moving signal on reflected wave signals
Implementation Method 3
generation circuitry generates reflected wave data through a phasing addition process using reflected wave signal of each channel
Implementation Method 4
reflected wave signals of an ultrasonic wave transmitted a plurality of times in the same scanning line
Data Source
AI summary
An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus according to an embodiment includes filter processing circuitry and generation circuitry. The filter processing circuitry performs a filter process of removing a still or minute-moving signal on reflected wave signals of an ultrasonic wave transmitted a plurality of times in the same scanning line. The generation circuitry generates reflected wave data through a phasing addition process using reflected wave signal of each channel after the filter process performed by the filter processing circuitry.