Near-field clutter in echocardiography is depicted as a diffuse haze hindering the visualization of the myocardium and the blood-pool, thereby degrading its diagnostic value. Several clutter filters have been developed, which are limited in patients with contraction motion and rhythm anomalies, and in threedimensional ultrasound. This study introduces a new near-field clutter reduction method, which preserves ultrasound speckles required for strain imaging. The filter developed detects the

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... field clutter region in the spatial frequency domain. The filter employs an oriented, multi-scale approach, and assumes the near-field clutter to be predominantly present in the highest and lowest bandpass images. These bandpass images were filtered, whilst sparing features in the myocardium and near-field clutter free regions. The performance of the filter was assessed in a volunteer study, in ten 3D apical and parasternal view acquisitions, and in a retrospective clinical study composed of twenty cardiac patients with different indications for echocardiography. The filter reduced near-field clutter in all datasets, whilst preserving all or most of the myocardium. Additionally, it demonstrated a consistent enhancement of image quality, with an increase in contrast of 4.3 dB on average, and generated a clearer myocardial boundary distinction. Furthermore, the speckles were preserved according to the quality index based on local variance, the structural similarity index method, and normalized cross-correlation values, being 0.82, 0.92, and 0.95 on average, respectively. Global longitudinal strain measurements on near-field clutter reduced images were improved or equivalent compared to the original acquisitions, with an average increase in strain signal-to-noise ratio of 34%.