A study of the spectral broadening of simulated Doppler signals using FFT and AR modelling

Doppler ultrasound is used clinically to detect stenosis in the carotid artery. The presence of stenosis may be identified by disturbed flow patterns distal to the stenosis that cause spectral broadening in the spectrum of the Doppler signal around peak systole. This paper investigates the behaviour of the spectral broadening index (SBI) derived from wide-band spectra obtained using autoregressive modelling (AR), compared with the SBI based on the fast-Fourier transform (FFT) spectra. Simulated Doppler signals were created using white noise and shaped filters to analyse spectra typically found around the systolic peak and to assess the magnitude and variance of AR and FFT-SBI for a range of signal-to-noise ratios. The results of the analysis show a strong correlation between the indices calculated using the FFT and AR algorithms. Despite the qualitative improvement of the AR spectra over the FFT, the estimation of SBI for short data frames is not significantly improved using AR.