A novel estimation system for multiple pulse echo signals from ultrasound contrast microbubbles

The understanding and exploitation of non-linear microbubble signals is an active research area that aims to advance contrast ultrasound into a high sensitivity and specificity diagnostic imaging modality. To discriminate the difference between echoes from tissue and contrast microbubbles, it is of significance to extract as much information of the reflected signals as possible, especially the pulse locations in the time domain and their corresponding spectral contents in the frequency domain. In this paper, a novel estimation system for extracting the information of interest is proposed. This estimation technique is based on non-parametric methods for coarse estimation, followed by a parametric method within Bayesian framework for estimation refinement. The results show that the pulse location and frequency content can be accurately estimated simultaneously. This assists in the design of transmit pulsing regimes in future work.