Phase Correction-Adaptive Line Enhancement for Noise Reduction of Low-Field NMR

The amplitude of low-field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is weak, and the echo is buried in the noise. The reduction of noise is critical to accurately extract echo amplitude. Phase correction-adaptive line enhancement (PC-ALE) is proposed to noise suppression based on the principle of ALE and NMR spin-echo characteristics. The echo amplitude is calculated after two-stage processes; phase shift from time-delay and filter tap would be compensated effectively in frequency domain. Simulation and experiments show that PC-ALE has prominent performance on noise suppression, envelope recovery, as well as the correction of the phase shift. The amplitude from the method of sample average nearby the middle of the echo is more accurate than the maximum peak when the PC-ALE is applied to noise suppression of spin-echo.