Time–frequency analysis of transient signals – application to cardiovascular control

A method for time–frequency decomposition (SDA) is presented for the analysis of cardiovascular signals, during steady state as well as under transient conditions. The SDA is applied to a simulated noisy non-stationary signal. It reliably discloses the time evolution of the different spectral components of the signal and does not present noise propagation as other time–frequency methods, such as Wigner–Ville distribution does. A comparison with the well-known short-time Fourier transform is also performed for non-stationary simulated signal showing that the SDA achieves a higher time–frequency resolution.