Development of a mobile pulse waveform analyzer for cardiovascular health monitoring

Portable Interactive Pulse Tactile Recorder and Player System

Pulse palpation is an effective method for diagnosing arterial diseases. However, most pulse measurement devices use preconfigured pressures to collect pulse signals, and most pulse tactile simulators can only display standard or predefined pulse waveforms. Here, a portable interactive human pulse measurement and reproduction system was developed that allows users to take arbitrary pulses and experience realistic simulated pulse tactile feedback in real time by using their natural pulse-taking behaviors. The system includes a pulse tactile recorder and a pulse tactile player. Pulse palpation forces and vibrations can be recorded and realistically replayed for later tactile exploration and examination. To retain subtle but vital pulse information, empirical mode decomposition was used to decompose pulse waveforms into several intrinsic mode functions. Artificial neural networks were then trained based on intrinsic mode functions to determine the relationship between the driving signals of the pulse tactile player and the resulting vibration waveforms. Experimental results indicate that the average normalized root mean square error and the average R-squared values between the reproduced and original pulses were 0.0654 and 0.958 respectively, which indicate that the system can reproduce high-fidelity pulse tactile vibrations.

Empirical wavelet transform-based delineator for arterial blood pressure waveforms

Arterial blood pressure (ABP) waveforms provide plenty of pathophysiological information about the cardiovascular system. ABP pulse analysis is a routine process used to investigate the health status of the cardiovascular system. ABP pulses correspond to the contraction and relaxation phenomena of the human heart. The contracting or pumping phase of the cardiac chamber corresponds to systolic pressure, whereas the resting or filling phase of the cardiac chamber corresponds to diastolic pressure. An ABP waveform commonly comprises systolic peak, diastolic onset, dicrotic notch, and dicrotic peak. Automatic ABP delineation is extremely important for various biomedical applications. In this paper, a delineator for onset and systolic peak detection in ABP signals is presented. The algorithm uses a recently developed empirical wavelet transform (EWT) for the delineation of arterial blood pulses. EWT is a new mathematical tool used to decompose a given signal into different modes and is based on the design of an adaptive wavelet filter bank. The performance of the proposed delineator is evaluated and validated over ABP waveforms of standard databases, such as the MIT-BIH Polysomnoghaphic Database, Fantasia Database, and Multiparameter Intelligent Monitoring in Intensive Care Database. In terms of pulse onset detection, the proposed delineator achieved an average error rate of 0.11%, sensitivity of 99.95%, and positive predictivity of 99.92%. In a similar manner for systolic peak detection, the proposed delineator achieved an average error rate of 0.10%, sensitivity of 99.96%, and positive predictivity of 99.92%.

Function formula oriented construction of Bayesian inference nets for diagnosis of cardiovascular disease

An intelligent cardiovascular disease (CVD) diagnosis system using hemodynamic parameters (HDPs) derived from sphygmogram (SPG) signal is presented to support the emerging patient-centric healthcare models. To replicate clinical approach of diagnosis through a staged decision process, the Bayesian inference nets (BIN) are adapted. New approaches to construct a hierarchical multistage BIN using defined function formulas and a method employing fuzzy logic (FL) technology to quantify inference nodes with dynamic values of statistical parameters are proposed. The suggested methodology is validated by constructing hierarchical Bayesian fuzzy inference nets (HBFIN) to diagnose various heart pathologies from the deduced HDPs. The preliminary diagnostic results show that the proposed methodology has salient validity and effectiveness in the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease.

Multi-Gaussian fitting for pulse waveform using Weighted Least Squares and multi-criteria decision making method

Analysis of pulse waveform is a low cost, non-invasive method for obtaining vital information related to the conditions of the cardiovascular system. In recent years, different Pulse Decomposition Analysis (PDA) methods have been applied to disclose the pathological mechanisms of the pulse waveform. All these methods decompose single-period pulse waveform into a constant number (such as 3, 4 or 5) of individual waves. Furthermore, those methods do not pay much attention to the estimation error of the key points in the pulse waveform. The estimation of human vascular conditions depends on the key points' positions of pulse wave. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Gaussian (MG) model to fit real pulse waveforms using an adaptive number (4 or 5 in our study) of Gaussian waves. The unknown parameters in the MG model are estimated by the Weighted Least Squares (WLS) method and the optimized weight values corresponding to different sampling points are selected by using the Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method. Performance of the MG model and the WLS method has been evaluated by fitting 150 real pulse waveforms of five different types. The resulting Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) was less than 2.0% and the estimation accuracy for the key points was satisfactory, demonstrating that our proposed method is effective in compressing, synthesizing and analyzing pulse waveforms.

Temporal and spatial properties of arterial pulsation measurement using pressure sensor array

Conventionally, a pulse taking platform is based on a single sensor, which initiates a feasible method of quantitative pulse diagnosis. The aim of this paper is to implement a pulse taking platform with a tactile array sensor. Three-dimensional wrist pulse signals are constructed, and the length, width, ascending slope, and descending slope are defined following the surface of the wrist pulse. And the pressure waveform of the wrist pulse obtained through proposed pulse-taking platform has the same performance as the single sensor. Finally, the results of a paired samples t-test reveal that the repeatability of the proposal platform is consistent with clinical experience. On the other hand, the results of ANOVA indicate that differences exist among different pulse taking depths, and this result is consistent with clinical experience in traditional Chinese medicine pulse diagnosis (TCMPD). Hence, the proposed pulse taking platform with an array sensor is feasible for quantification in TCMPD.