Evaluation of stationarity of laser Doppler signal in the pulse-based synchronized-averaging analysis

Pulse parameters calculated from the LDF waveform based on time-domain synchronized averaging analysis were shown to be able to discriminate the difference in microvascular resistance, however its applicability depends seriously on the assumption of signal stationarity. In this study, our aim is to investigate the effect of pulse number, which may destroy the signal stationarity, on the pulse LDF parameters. The study presented here has established the criteria for pulse number to achieve the signal stationarity so that the microcirculatory discriminability of the pulse-based time-averaging analysis on LDF signal can be improved. The proposed quantitative method to verify the assumption of signal stationarity when utilizing time-averaging can also be applied to analysis of other bio-signals.