Motion Artifact Elimination Algorithm and Architecture for Eigen-based Clutter Filter in Color Doppler Processing*

Color Doppler imaging is used to visualize the distribution of blood flow in the region of interest. Slight relative motion causes severe image corruption and incorrect blood velocity estimation. In this work, we propose a velocity bias cancellation algorithm based on the autocorrelation technique, which is widely used in color Doppler to eliminate the motion artifact. The proposed algorithm can assist clutter filter in suppressing tissue noise effectively while compensating for the biased velocity. The proposed algorithm enhances the performance around 3-9 dB in Signal-to-Clutter Ratio (SCR), and reduces the error of blood velocity estimation by around 69%. Besides, we propose the rearrangement scheme to increase the throughput by reducing the average number of computed eigen-components from 8 to only 2.35. The proposed velocity bias cancellation algorithm and the rearrangement scheme are implemented in TSMC CMOS 90nm technology. The area and maximum operation frequency are 3.39 mm2 and 100 MHz, respectively.