An adaptive approach to computing the spectrum and mean frequency of Doppler signals

Modern ultrasound Doppler systems are facing the problem of processing increasingly shorter data sets. Spectral analysis of the strongly nonstationary Doppler signal needs to shorten the analysis window while maintaining a low variance and high resolution spectrum. Color flow imaging requires estimation of the Doppler mean frequency from even shorter Doppler data sets to obtain both a high frame rate and high spatial resolution. We reconsider these two estimation problems in light of adaptive methods. A regularized parametric method for spectral analysis as well as an adapted mean frequency estimator are developed. The choice of the adaptive criterion is then addressed and adaptive spectral and mean frequency estimators are developed to minimize the mean square error on estimation in the presence of noise. Two suboptimal spectral and mean-frequency estimators are then derived for real-time applications. Finally, their performance is compared to that of both the FFT based periodogram and the AR parametric spectral analysis for the spectral estimator, and, to both the correlation angle and the Kristoffersen's [8] estimators for the mean frequency estimator using Doppler data recorded in vitro.