Compensating for window effects in the calculation of spectrographic instantaneous bandwidth

Exact results derived by Cohen and Lee (1988-1990) are used to study the distortion induced by the window in the computation of instantaneous bandwidth via the spectrogram. These concepts have been recently used in an interesting study regarding lesion-induced blood flow disturbances, where an approximation was made to compensate for the window effects. We show that this compensation is accurate for stationary signals, but becomes increasingly poorer as the signal becomes less stationary (e.g., large frequency modulations). We propose an alternative technique to reduce the window distortions, and point out the use of other time-frequency distributions that do not suffer such distortions.