Dual frequency bioelectrical impedance analysis to estimate hematocrit for prognosis of dengue fever in Indian children

Abstract

A noninvasive investigation to ascertain the hematocrit (HCT) or packed cell volume (PCV) was conducted on 44 hospitalized dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) subjects, male and female aged between 3 and 14 years using bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA). Among the 44 subjects, 30 subjects were confirmed to be non-structural protein-1 (NS1) positive at the time of admission, whose blood investigations such as HCT level, platelet (PLT) count, aspartate aminotransferase (AST) level and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) level were taken for the classification of risk as low risk (LR) and high risk (HR) DHF. Electrical conductivity of blood reflects a linear correlation with HCT. To provide a better and more accurate estimate of HCT, a dual frequency method is proposed to calculate the conductivities of plasma and blood cells. The resistance at 100 kHz is used to estimate the conductivity of blood cells and the impedance at 5 kHz to estimate the conductivity of plasma. Statistical analysis reveals that the HCT estimated using the proposed dual frequency method shows a significant difference with a single frequency (50 kHz) estimate of HCT and also shows a good correlation with the blood investigation results. In addition, statistical analysis of the proposed method on different fever subjects indicates a significant difference with DHF.