Clutter Suppression in 3D in-vivo Medical Ultrasound Using In-Face Extended Frank-Wolfe Method

3D echocardiography provides enhanced spatial visualization and improved diagnostic potential compared to 2D echocardiography, but its clinical application is limited by clutter artifacts, low temporal resolution, and reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) due to transducer limitations. Existing 2D clutter suppression methods relying on high frame rates are ineffective for 3D scans. To address this, we propose a novel spatiotemporal clutter suppression technique that uses the In-Face Extended Frank-Wolfe Method (IFXFWM) to perform low-rank approximation on 3D spatio-temporal data. Our method forms Casorati matrices from 3D sub-cubes derived from multiple time frames and applies IFXFWM to extract clutter-free reconstructions. Evaluation on 3D echocardiographic scans acquired under simulated attenuation conditions demonstrates significant improvement over conventional methods such as RAPID, especially in preserving anatomical structures.