An esprit-based parameter estimator for spectroscopic data

The pulse spin-locking sequence is a common excitation sequence for magnetic resonance and nuclear quadrupole resonance signals, with the resulting measurement data being well modeled as a train of exponentially damped sinusoidals. In this paper, we derive an ESPRIT-based estimator for such signals, together with the corresponding Cramér-Rao lower bound. The proposed estimator is computationally efficient and only requires prior knowledge of the number of spectral lines, which is in general available in the considered applications. Numerical simulations indicate that the proposed method is close to statistically efficient, and that it offers an attractive approach for initialization of existing statistically efficient gradient or search based techniques.