Abstract
Blood pressure (BP) is a direct indicator of hypertension, a dangerous and potentially deadly condition. Regular monitoring of BP is thus important, but many people have aversion towards cuff-based devices, and their limitation is that they can only be used at rest. Using just a photoplethysmogram (PPG) to estimate BP is a potential solution investigated in our study. We analyzed the MIMIC III database for high-quality PPG and arterial BP waveforms, resulting in over 700 h of signals after preprocessing, belonging to 510 subjects. We then used the PPG alongside its first and second derivative as inputs into a novel spectro-temporal deep neural network with residual connections. We have shown in a leave-one-subject-out experiment that the network is able to model the dependency between PPG and BP, achieving mean absolute errors of 9.43 for systolic and 6.88 for diastolic BP. Additionally we have shown that personalization of models is important and substantially improves the results, while deriving a good general predictive model is difficult. We have made crucial parts of our study, especially the list of used subjects and our neural network code, publicly available, in an effort to provide a solid baseline and simplify potential comparison between future studies on an explicit MIMIC III subset.
Highlights
Blood pressure (BP) measurement is the most important commonly performed medical office test [1].BP is a direct indicator of hypertension, an important risk factor for a variety of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), which were the most common cause of death in 2015, responsible for almost 15 million deaths worldwide according to the World Health Organization (WHO) [2]
Regular BP monitoring is important for the general population, but especially vital for people already suffering from hypertension or related conditions, as such people are vulnerable to elevated BP [3]
All the results are compared with a dummy regressor, which always outputs the mean of the systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) from the train set as the prediction
Summary
Blood pressure (BP) measurement is the most important commonly performed medical office test [1].BP is a direct indicator of hypertension, an important risk factor for a variety of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), which were the most common cause of death in 2015, responsible for almost 15 million deaths worldwide according to the World Health Organization (WHO) [2]. An obvious aversion towards regular BP monitoring is present This can in large part be attributed to the nature of the measuring devices. Cuff-based devices remain the golden standard and are commonly recommended by physicians [3]. These devices offer the highest measurement accuracy, they have several downsides. The measuring event itself can cause stress or anxiety in the subject, which can in turn influence the measured BP values. This is commonly known as the white-coat syndrome [5]
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