title: Spectrogram analysis of arterial Doppler signals for off-line automated hits detection.
abstract: Recently, a time processing of arterial Doppler signals was proposed to detect automatically high-intensity transient signals (HITS). This technique provided satisfactory detection results, but was not always constantly accurate, particularly with high-resistance blood velocity profiles. A time-frequency processing, based on the spectrogram, is presented to detect the presence of emboli in the arterial Doppler signals. The method uses the narrow-band hypothesis and extracts the detection criterion from the time-frequency representation (TFR). A first database of 560 peripheral arterial Doppler HITS was created to study microemboli and to define the normal limits to be used in our method. A threshold was experimentally defined using this database, and then applied to 38 recordings from 12 patients. Using another database, 6 human expert Doppler users reported 140, 176, 155, 161, 161 and 146 HITS, corresponding to a total of 197 different observed HITS. When an event was detected by at least 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 of the observers, sensitivity of the automatic detection was 93.9, 91.7, 89.6, 88.7, 84.7 and 73.1%, respectively. The sensitivity of our automatic detection is, thus, highly associated with the number of observers in agreement. A preliminary experiment has been performed to test the method in the case of long recording duration. In 15 patients, 6 h 24 min of recordings have been analyzed. The proposed automated processing provided an overall sensibility of 91.5%. The present work shows that this detection scheme preserves good sensibility and improves the positive predictive value compared with the time-processing recently proposed.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Université du Maine, Le Mans, France.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Roy
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Montrésor
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Abraham
authors.forename: J L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Saumet
mesh_terms: D001158:Arteries / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D004617:Embolism / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D015588:Observer Variation; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D018608:Ultrasonography, Doppler / Q000379:methods*