A modified Goertzel structure for efficient real-time blood velocity profile estimation

Many applications utilize short-gate pulse-Doppler schemes to extract velocity information, such as a blood vessel's velocity profile. Advances in signal processing hardware permit software gating to replace traditional hardware gating. Although software gating can be advantageous, the added computational complexity hinders real-time operation, which is clinically desirable. Thus, high-resolution, real-time operation requires efficient algorithms for data processing. This paper develops a modified Goertzel structure for efficient real-time blood velocity profile estimation. When compared with traditional computational methods, this modified structure offers significant advantages with regard to memory, number of operations, and latency of estimation. Simulations are provided to demonstrate algorithm effectiveness.