Echo motion imaging with adaptive clutter filter for assessment of cardiac blood flow

Visualization of the vortex blood flow in the cardiac chamber is a potential diagnostic tool for the evaluation of cardiac function. In the present study, a method for automatic selection of the desirable cutoff frequency of a moving target indicator filter, namely, a clutter filter, was proposed in order to visualize complex blood flows by the ultrahigh-frame-rate imaging of echoes from blood particles while suppressing clutter echoes. In this method, the cutoff frequency was adaptively changed as a function of the velocity of the heart wall (clutter source) in each frame. The feasibility of the proposed method was examined through the measurement of a healthy volunteer using parallel receive beamforming with a single transmission of a non-steered diverging beam. Using the moving target indicator filter as above with the cutoff frequency determined by the proposed method, the vortex-like blood flow in the cardiac chamber was visualized as movements of echoes from blood particles at a very high frame rate of 6024 Hz while suppressing clutter echoes.