The effect of accelerated tissue motion on clutter rejection in color flow imaging

To improve the clutter rejection in color flow imaging, the signal was mixed down with the estimated mean clutter Doppler frequency prior to clutter filtering. This technique was tested on both in-vivo and simulated data. The simulations showed that for a constant velocity clutter signal, the downmixing algorithm gave significant improvement, and had close to optimum clutter rejection. For accelerated motion, the downmixing algorithm performed much worse than the optimum filter, and there was just a slight improvement with mixing.