Nonstationarity broadening in pulsed Doppler spectrum measurements

Conventional measurement of the spectrum of arterial signals from the pulsed ultrasonic Doppler instrument uses windowed, sequential data segments. The Doppler signal is assumed stationary for the duration of each segment. It is shown here that this assumption is often unreasonable and the effect of mean frequency variation during the data segment has been investigated for different windows and rates of change of mean frequency. A data segment length giving maximum spectral resolution is shown to exist for each window type and rate of frequency change.