Gapped sampled spectrum doppler estimation

Duplex and triplex transmit patterns that involve gaps in the spectrum Doppler samples allow pulse repetition frequency increases and/or frame rate increases that cannot be flexibly achieved by conventional uniformly sampled transmit schemes. We make two claims in this paper. First, previously reported nonparametric gapped sampled spectrum estimators are technically feasible for handling the duplex and triplex transmit patterns found in common medical ultrasound applications. Second, such estimators that coherently average within an axial/temporal 2-D window have superior SNR compared with their incoherent counterparts. Moreover, this fact extends to previously reported fully sampled incoherent estimators, which can be improved by using their coherent version. We verify the methods by steady-state flow phantom experiments and in vivo examples of the left clavicular artery and the ascending aorta. For the flow phantom experiments, we use the three quantitative metrics of SNR, root mean square error, and zero frequency peak full-width at half-maximum to evaluate robustness and resolution. Results indicate that through proper parameters, periodically gapped estimators can produce results similar to their fully sampled counterparts. Fourier synthesis of the spectral estimates produces the fully sampled time-domain audio signal, and we give stereo audio examples for the clavicular artery.