Comparison Between Pulse and ECG

Abstract

Both wrist pulse and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are mainly caused by cardiac activities and are valuable in analyzing heart rhythms and cardiac diseases. For noninvasive monitoring, recent studies indicate that ECG and wrist pulse signal can be adopted for the diagnosis of several non-cardiac diseases and reflect the movement of blood and the change of vessel diameter. To reveal the complementarities between pulse signal and ECG, a comparative study of these two signals is conducted for the diagnosis of non-cardiac diseases. The two types of signals are compared based on two classes of indicators: information complexity and classification performance. The results show that wrist pulse blood flow signal is more informative by complexity measure and can achieve higher classification accuracy. Some examples of non-cardiac diseases, e.g., diabetes, liver, and gallbladder diseases, are given to illustrate the strengths of wrist pulse signal.