Sequential Emboli Detection From Ultrasound Outpatient Data

Abstract

This paper addresses the detection of emboli from signals acquired with a new miniaturized and portable transcranial Doppler ultrasound device. The use of this device enables outpatient monitoring but increases the number of artifacts. These artifacts usually come from the patient voice and motion and can be superimposed to emboli. For this reason and because of the scarcity of emboli compared to artifacts, reliably detect emboli is a challenging task. As an example, the 11809 s of signal used in this study contained 0.06 % of embolic events and 10.14 % of artifacts. Herein, we propose an automatic and sequential approach. The method is based on sequential determination of high intensity transient signals. We also define efficient features to describe emboli in the time frequency representation. On our database, the number of artifacts detected as emboli is divided by more than 10 compared to the other algorithms reported in the literature.