3D Coronary Blood Flow Imaging: A Comparison of Automatic Adaptive Clutter Filters

Blood flow in the coronary arteries may be detected using transthoracic echo Doppler. However, measurements are challenging due to strong tissue signal overlapping with the blood signal. In this work, high frame rate imaging is proposed in conjunction with eigenvector based adaptive clutter filtering in order to improve coronary flow detection. Plane wave transmissions were used for 3D recordings of the left circumflex and posterior descending artery of healthy volunteers over one cardiac cycle. Two automatic eigen-based filters, similarity matrix diagonal projection (SMDP) and whitening filter were compared to a standard high pass Butterworth filter. 2D power Doppler projections at different time points showed that SMDP is the preferred candidate since it removes flashing artifacts without resulting in dropouts. For future work, SMDP will be further investigated in order to be able to select the optimal eigenvectors even when blood and tissue region are not clearly separated due to spatial overlap between blood and clutter.