The Use of Wavelets for Wall Removal and Scatter Enhancement in Ultrasound Blood Velocity Profile Measurements

Ultrasound waves, transmitted by a transducer into a body, are reflected and scattered by the materials they encounter in the body. In case of blood flow measurements in an artery, the received signal will contain the information not only from the moving red blood cells, but the reflections from the vessel wall of other soft tissue structures as well. The discrimination between ultrasound signals originating from scattering of red blood cells and reflection of tissue is one of the major problems for blood velocity assessment. Traditionally, in Doppler processing, where the highest blood velocities in the middle of the vessel are estimated, this discrimination is obtained via a high pass filter with a static cut-off frequency related to the maximum frequency content of the reflections. This is illustrated in Fig.1 (top). As illustrated in Fig. 1 (bottom), problems occur for velocity estimation of slowly moving blood cells close to the vessel wall and in case of perpendicular insonification [1]. In these cases, there is no frequency shift in the signal received from scattering on blood cells. Furthermore, the intensity of the reflections from the vessel wall is highest in case of perpendicular insonification. Filtering in these cases is very challenging since it allows the assessment of blood velocity profiles without contrast agents.