A feasibility study for measuring accurate tendon displacements using an audio-based fourier analysis of pulsed-wave doppler ultrasound signals

The accuracy of pulsed-wave Doppler ultrasound displacement measurements of a slow moving ldquotendon-likerdquo string was investigated in this study. This was accomplished by estimating string displacements using an audio-based Fourier analysis of a pulsed-wave Doppler signal from a commercial ultrasound scanner. Our feasibility study showed that the proposed technique is much more accurate at estimating the actual string displacement in comparison to the scanner´s onboard software. Furthermore, this study also shows that a real-time Doppler data acquisition from an ultrasound scanner is possible for the ultimate purpose of real-time biological tendon displacement monitoring.