Comparison of adaptive clutter filters for vector velocity estimation: Realistic simulations and in vivo examples

The performance of adaptive FIR filters and SVD filters for vector velocity imaging in the carotid arteries have been investigated. Synthetic data created using a combination of in vivo data from a healthy volunteer and flow simulations were used to investigate scenarios with low blood flow, in combination with realistic clutter motion. The results from the synthetic datasets indicate that the investigated FIR and SVD filters performed similarly and shared the same limitations. Although the SVD filter did not show increased performance in terms of bias and standard deviation of the velocity estimates compared to the FIR filter, an advantage of this approach is that adaptive filtering may be performed without prior wall motion estimation.