Noise reduction in Doppler ultrasound signals using an adaptive decomposition algorithm

A novel de-noising method for improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of Doppler ultrasound blood flow signals, called the matching pursuit method, has been proposed. Using this method, the Doppler ultrasound signal was first decomposed into a linear expansion of waveforms, called time-frequency atoms, which were selected from a redundant dictionary named Gabor functions. Subsequently, a decay parameter-based algorithm was employed to determine the decomposition times. Finally, the de-noised Doppler signal was reconstructed using the selected components. The SNR improvements, the amount of the lost component in the original signal and the maximum frequency estimation precision with simulated Doppler blood flow signals, have been used to evaluate a performance comparison, based on the wavelet, the wavelet packets and the matching pursuit de-noising algorithms. From the simulation and clinical experiment results, it was concluded that the performance of the matching pursuit approach was better than those of the DWT and the WPs methods for the Doppler ultrasound signal de-noising.