NMR signal enhancement via a new time-frequency transform

A reliable method to reduce the noise from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals using a previously developed linear critically-sampled time-frequency transform is proposed. In addition to its low computational requirements, this transform has many theoretical advantages that make it a good candidate for NMR signal enhancement. NMR signals, in the transform domain, are concentrated in a very few number of coefficients while the noise is fairly distributed among the coefficients. Therefore, performing a thresholding technique in the transform domain significantly enhances the signal. Comparison with other noise reduction techniques used for the same purpose showed that this technique has superior performance thus confirming the theoretical expectations.