Predicting Arterial Stiffness From the Digital Volume Pulse Waveform

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is currently the biggest single cause of mortality in the developed world, hence, the early detection of its onset is vital for effective prevention therapies. Aortic stiffness as measured by aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV) has been shown to be an independent predictor of CVD, however, the measurement of PWV is complex and time consuming. Recent studies have shown that pulse contour characteristics depend on arterial properties such as arterial stiffness. This paper presents a method for estimating PWV from the digital volume pulse (DVP), a waveform that can be rapidly and simply acquired by measuring the transmission of infra-red light through the finger pulp. PWV and DVP were measured on 461 subjects attending a clinic in South East London. Techniques for extracting features from the DVP contour based on physiology and information theory were compared. Low and high stiffness were defined according to a threshold level of PWV chosen to be 10 m/s. Using a support vector machine-based classifier, it is possible to achieve high overall classification rates on unseen data. Further, the use of support vector regression techniques lead to a direct real-valued estimate of PWV which outperforms previous methods based on multilinear regression. We, therefore, conclude that support vector machine-based classification and regression techniques provide effective prediction of arterial stiffness from the simple measurement of the digital volume pulse. This technique could be usefully employed as a cheap and effective CVD screening technique for use in general practice clinics.

Relationship of Arterial Stiffness Index and Pulse Pressure With Cardiovascular Disease and Mortality

“…Height (meters) was divided by the time between the peaks of the pulse waveform to obtain the ASI in m/s 15. This method has been validated by comparing it with carotid‐femoral PWV in 3 independent studies that concluded both measurements are highly correlated and that ASI is a simple, inexpensive, rapid technique that requires no training and is operator independent 9, 10, 16…”

“…The shape of the waveform is directly related to the time it takes for the pulse wave to travel through the arterial tree. These tools might be of interest to quickly estimate CVD risk 9, 10…”

Investigation of peripheral photoplethysmographic morphology changes induced during a hand-elevation study

“…Furthermore, the peripheral PPG pulse has been described as becoming ''damped, delayed and diminished'' with increasing severity of vascular disease [1,8]. In order to quantify these morphological changes, various features of the ac PPG pulse have been extracted and analysed [9,10].…”

“…These various analysis techniques have been applied to assess cardiovascular aging and systemic vascular resistance [9,15], endothelial function and the response to vasoactive drugs [17,18], in attempts to assess arterial blood pressure noninvasively [19], and even to assess systemic conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome [20].…”

A new method for the acquisition of arterial pulse wave using self-mixing interferometry

“…As it is described in [5], the arterial pulse wave is one of the most important signals used on clinical medicine. The analysis of this signal can lead to the diagnosis of several cardiovascular diseases such as arterial stiffness [6,7] and arteriosclerosis [8]. Different optical methods have been previously $ This document is a collaborative effort.…”