Denoising performance of modified dual-tree complex wavelet transform for processing quadrature embolic Doppler signals

Abstract

Quadrature signals are dual-channel signals obtained from the systems employing quadrature demodulation. Embolic Doppler ultrasound signals obtained from stroke-prone patients by using Doppler ultrasound systems are quadrature signals caused by emboli, which are particles bigger than red blood cells within circulatory system. Detection of emboli is an important step in diagnosing stroke. Most widely used parameter in detection of emboli is embolic signal-to-background signal ratio. Therefore, in order to increase this ratio, denoising techniques are employed in detection systems. Discrete wavelet transform has been used for denoising of embolic signals, but it lacks shift invariance property. Instead, dual-tree complex wavelet transform having near-shift invariance property can be used. However, it is computationally expensive as two wavelet trees are required. Recently proposed modified dual-tree complex wavelet transform, which reduces the computational complexity, can also be used. In this study, the denoising performance of this method is extensively evaluated and compared with the others by using simulated and real quadrature signals. The quantitative results demonstrated that the modified dual-tree-complex-wavelet-transform-based denoising outperforms the conventional discrete wavelet transform with the same level of computational complexity and exhibits almost equal performance to the dual-tree complex wavelet transform with almost half computational cost.