Quality control in off-pump coronary artery bypass surgery using ultrasound color flow imaging with adaptive clutter rejection filters

Quality control in off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery can be done efficiently using ultrasound color flow imaging. Due to the excessive tissue movement of the beating heart, new methods for clutter filtering should be applied to properly separate signal originating from blood, from the clutter artefact signals. Ultrasound data obtained from an experimental pig model undergoing CABG surgery was used to compare the commonly used polynomial regression filter to three adaptive filtering techniques for clutter removal. Results showed that the three adaptive filters outperformed the non-adaptive PR filter with better attenuation of clutter signal in the presence or uniform or accelerated tissue movement.