Real time SVD-based clutter filtering using randomized singular value decomposition and spatial downsampling for micro-vessel imaging on a Verasonics ultrasound system

Singular value decomposition (SVD)-based clutter filters can robustly reject the tissue clutter as compared with the conventional high pass filter-based clutter filters. However, the computational burden of SVD makes real time SVD-based clutter filtering challenging (e.g. frame rate at least 10–15 Hz with region of interest of about 4 × 4 cm²). Recently, we proposed an acceleration method based on randomized SVD (rSVD) clutter filtering and randomized spatial downsampling, which can significantly reduce the computational complexity without compromising the clutter rejection capability. However, this method has not been implemented on an ultrasound scanner and tested for its performance. In this study, we implement this acceleration method on a Verasonics scanner using a multi-core CPU architecture, and evaluate the selections of the imaging and processing parameters to enable real time micro-vessel imaging. The Blood-to-Clutter Ratio (BCR) performance was evaluated on a Verasonics machine with different settings of parameters such as block size and ensemble size. The demonstration of real time process was implemented on a 12-core CPU (downsampling factor of 12, 12-threads in this study) host computer. The processing time of the rSVD-based clutter filter was less than 30 ms and BCRs were higher than 20 dB as the block size, ensemble size and the rank of tissue clutter subspace were set as 30 × 30, 45 and 26 respectively. We also demonstrate that the micro-vessel imaging frame rate of the proposed architecture can reach approximately 22 Hz when the block size, ensemble size and the rank of tissue clutter subspace were set as 20 × 20 pixels, 45 and 26 respectively (using both images and supplementary videos). The proposed method may be important for real time 2D scanning of tumor microvessels in 3D to select and store the most representative 2D view with most abnormal micro-vessels for better diagnosis.