Patent Document ID: 8500647
Application ID: 11411655
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. An ultrasound system comprising: a scan head configured to acquire sample datasets from a subject; and a signal processor communicatively coupled to the scan head, the signal processor configured to: receive a first number of sample datasets from the scan head that represent lines of echo data through an anatomical region of interest; computing a correlation matrix for each dataset; computing an averaged correlation matrix from the correlation matrices associated with each of the datasets; diagonalizing the averaged correlation matrix into a set of eigenvalues and eigenvectors; producing a weighted matrix that corresponds to the set of eigenvalues having weights with a value of 1 if a corresponding eigenvalue exceeds a threshold value plus a first margin, the value of 1 indicating that the corresponding eigenvector represents a component of a clutter signal; a weight value with a value of 0 if a corresponding eigenvalue falls below the threshold value minus a second margin, the value of 0 indicating that the corresponding eigenvector does not represent a component of the clutter signal; and a weight value with a value between 0 and 1 if a corresponding eigenvalue falls between the threshold value minus the second margin and the threshold value plus the first margin, the value between 0 and 1 representing a measure for the degree to which the corresponding eigenvector represents a component of the clutter signal; computing a projection matrix from the eigenvectors and the weighted matrix; and subtracting the projection matrix from an identity matrix to determine a set of coefficients for a first signal filter to remove clutter from echo signals received from the anatomical region of interest.