Linear and nonlinear techniques for the deconvolution of hormone time-series.

Pulsatile hormone secretion is usually investigated by measuring hormone concentration in samples of peripheral plasma. In this paper, the deconvolution of hormone time-series to reconstruct the instantaneous secretion rate of glands is considered. Various techniques are discussed and compared in order to overcome the ill-conditioning of the problem and reduce the computational burden. In particular, linear techniques based on least squares, maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation, and Wiener filtering are compared. A new nonlinear MAP estimator that keeps into account the non-Gaussian distribution of the unknown signal is worked out and shown to yield the best results. The performances of the algorithms are tested on simulated time-series as well as on series of Luteinizing Hormone (LH).