Continuous Artery Wall Motion Tracking Using Flexible and Wearable Ultrasonic Sensor by Signal Decomposition

A flexible and wearable ultrasonic sensor (WUS) constructed from a piezoelectric polymer film has been proposed for long-term continuous monitoring of the artery motion. The non-focused plane-wave ultrasonic beam of the WUS requires a signal processing methodology that can isolate the arterial wall echo from undesired scattering echoes caused by the adjacent tissues. Matching pursuit signal decomposition based on the Gaussian modulated sinusoidal signal model was performed to isolate the wall echo. Using the parameters of the isolated wall echo, the wall motion was estimated over the ultrasound signals acquired in M-mode. The result captured the artery wall motion associated with the blood pressure waveform.