Signal processing for ultrasound-based arterial pulse wave velocity estimation

In this paper we propose a new signal processing approach for estimating arterial pulse wave velocity (PWV) in a uniform arterial segment based on ultrasound measurements. The new approach compensates for whatever pulse wave reflections are present in the observation. We show that the long-axis PWV estimation problem with reflections is similar to that of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for two far-field, narrowband, coherent sources. A high-SNR simulation is performed to compare the performance of the new method to that of three existing methods in the presence of reflections. A limited amount of in vivo data is processed and the resulting estimates, although superior to those obtained from existing methods, are seen to be noisy. Finally, further research directions are outlined.