A Doppler ultrasound clutter phantom.

We describe two variations of a phantom designed to evaluate the wall filters implemented on colour and spectral Doppler instruments. Both variations use an acoustic beam splitter to place the same Doppler sample volume within a motor-driven clutter belt and a flow source, which is either a second belt (dual-belt phantom) or a vascular phantom (belt/vascular phantom). We used the dual-belt phantom to evaluate the effects of the clutter belt velocity, flow belt velocity and clutter-to-flow power ratio on the reported colour Doppler shifts. The results show that the choice of wall filter, as well as the amplitudes and velocities of the clutter and flow components, affect the measured Doppler shifts. Results obtained with the belt/vascular phantom show that colour Doppler shifts due to the moving fluid depend strongly on the clutter velocity and choice of wall filter. However, only a small dependence on Doppler signal strength was observed.