The use of the novel NIR-based device is safer and more psychologically tolerable, and it is not associated to an increase of procedure length or number of attempts.

A real-time hardware software 2-D vector Doppler system has been realized by means of the FEMMINA platform. The system operates by performing two independent 1-D Doppler estimations on the scan plane of a linear array probe along different directions; the probe is connected to a commercial scanner. The reconstructed velocity is presented in real-time as superposition on the conventional B-mode images. Two different scanning techniques have been implemented, in order to carry out the 2-D Doppler investigation in the area of interest. These techniques allow to use the system both in vivo and in vivo. An extensive set of simulations has been performed in order to establish a gold standard regarding vector Doppler 2-D techniques, and to be able to assess the performance of the 2-D Doppler system by comparing simulated and experimental results. The whole real-time 2-D vector Doppler system is fully certified as hospital equipment, and thus it can be employed to carry out an experimental characterization of the 2-D Doppler technique in the clinical environment.

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An original method to denoise ultrasonic images affected by speckle is presented. Speckle is modeled as a signal-dependent noise corrupting the image. Noise reduction is approached as a Wiener-like filtering performed in a shift-invariant wavelet domain by means of an adaptive rescaling of the coefficients of an undecimated octave decomposition. The scaling factor of each coefficient is calculated from local statistics of the degraded image, the parameters of the noise model, and the wavelet filters. Experimental results demonstrate that excellent background smoothing as well as preservation of edge sharpness and fine details can be obtained

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