Low-rank modal endpoints from beat-resolved retinal arterial Doppler holography velocity waveforms characterize the response to flicker provocation

Abstract

Conventional retinal flicker endpoints quantify changes in diameter, mean velocity, or flow but do not capture the modal concentration of the cardiac velocity waveform during neurovascular stimulation. Here, beat-resolved retinal Doppler holography and low-rank modal decomposition are combined to derive compact arterial endpoints from unfiltered arterial segment-velocity waveforms sampled across beats and vessel locations. For each acquisition, locally centered waveforms are assembled into a common matrix and decomposed by singular-value decomposition (SVD). Robust summaries quantify total pulsatile scale, modal amplitude, residual amplitude, mean-to-pulsatile balance, and singular-spectrum dimensionality; the same construction can also be applied descriptively to individual beats. We demonstrate the framework using 33 temporally ordered Baseline~1/Flicker/Baseline~2 acquisitions from one eye. Relative to the pooled baselines, 13-Hz flicker was associated with lower centered-waveform RMS scale $R_0$ and leading-mode amplitude $A_1$, and with higher robust residual-amplitude ratios $ρ_1$ and $ρ_2$, mean-to-pulsatile ratio MPR, effective rank, and participation ratio; these contrasts showed exploratory within-session separation after Holm adjustment. No evidence of differences in the absolute residual amplitudes $R_1$ and $R_2$ was detected; together, these observations are consistent with reduced concentration in the leading acquisition-specific arterial pulse mode rather than an increase in absolute residual pulsatility.