Blood Pressure Estimation from Electrocardiogram and Photoplethysmography Signals Using Continuous Wavelet Transform and Convolutional Neural Network

Cuff-less and continuous blood pressure (BP) measurement has recently become an active research area in the field of remote healthcare monitoring. There is a growing demand for automated BP estimation and monitoring for various long-term and chronic conditions. Automated BP monitoring can produce a good amount of rich health data, which increases the chance of early diagnosis and treatments that are critical for a long-term condition such as hypertension and Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). However, mining and processing this vast amount of data is challenging, which is aimed to address in this research. We employed a continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to estimate the BP. The electrocardiogram (ECG), photoplethysmography (PPG) and arterial blood pressure (ABP) signals were extracted from the online Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC III) database. The scalogram of each signal was created and used for training and testing our proposed CNN model that can implicitly learn to extract the descriptive features from the training data. This study achieved a promising BP estimation approach has been achieved without employing engineered feature extraction that is comparable with previous works. Experimental results demonstrated a low root mean squere error (RMSE) rate of 3.36 mmHg and a high accuracy of 86.3% for BP estimations. The proposed CNN-based model can be considered as a reliable and feasible approach to estimate BP for continuous remote healthcare monitoring

딥러닝 기반 혈압 예측 기법

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2020. 8. 윤성로.While COVID-19 is changing the world's social profile, it is expected that the telemedicine sector, which has not been activated due to low regulation and reliability, will also undergo a major change. As COVID-19 spreads in the United States, the US Department of Health \& Human Services temporarily loosens the standards for telemedicine, while enabling telemedicine using Facebook, Facebook Messenger-based video chat, Hangouts, and Skype. The expansion of the telemedicine market is expected to quickly transform the existing treatment-oriented hospital-led medical market into a digital healthcare service market focused on prevention and management through wearables, big data, and health records analysis. In this prevention and management-oriented digital healthcare service, it is very important to develop a technology that can easily monitor a person's health status. One of the vital signs that can be used for personal health monitoring is blood pressure. High BP is a common and dangerous condition. About 1 out of 3 adults in the U.S. (about 75 million people) have high BP. This common condition increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, two of the leading causes of death for Americans. High BP is called the silent killer because it often has no warning signs or symptoms, and many people are not aware they have it. For these reasons, it is important to develop a technology that can easily and conveniently check BP regularly. In biomedical data analysis, various studies are being attempted to effectively analyze by applying machine learning to biomedical big data accumulated in large quantities. However, collecting blood pressure-related data at the level of big data is very difficult and very expensive because it takes a lot of manpower and time. So in this dissertation, we proposed a three-step strategy to overcome these issues. First, we describe a BP prediction model with extraction and concentration CNN architecture, to process publicly disclosed sequential ECG and PPG dataset. Second, we evaluate the performance of the developed model by applying the developed model to privately measured data. To address the third issue, we propose the knowledge distillation method and input pre-processing method to improve the accuracy of the blood pressure prediction model. All the methods proposed in this dissertation are based on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Unlike other studies based on manual recognition of the features, by utilizing the advantage of deep learning which automatically extracts features, raw biomedical signals are used intact to reflect the inherent characteristics of the signals themselves.코로나 19에 의한 전 세계의 사회적 프로필 변화로, 규제와 신뢰성이 낮기 때문에 활성화 되지 않은 원격 의료 분야도 큰 변화를 겪을 것으로 예상됩니다. 코로나 19가 미국에 퍼짐에 따라 미국 보건복지부는 원격 진료의 표준을 일시적으로 완화하면서 페이스북, 페이스북 메신저 기반 화상 채팅, 행아웃, 스카이프를 사용한 원격 진료를 가능하게 했습니다. 원격의료 시장의 확장은 기존의 치료중심 병원주도의 의료시장을 웨어러블, 빅 데이터 및 건강기록 분석을 통한 예방 및 관리에 중점을 둔 디지털 의료 서비스 시장으로 빠르게 변화시킬 것으로 예상됩니다. 이러한 예방 및 관리 중심의 디지털 헬스케어 서비스에서는 사람의 건강 상태를 쉽게 모니터링 할 수 있는 기술 개발이 매우 중요한데 혈압은 개인 건강 모니터링에 사용될 수 있는 필수 징후 중 하나 입니다. 고혈압은 아주 흔하고 위험한 질환입니다. 미국 성인 3명중 1명(약 7,500만명)이 고혈압을 가지고 있습니다. 이는 미국인의 주요 사망 원인 중 두가지인 심장질환과 뇌졸중의 위험을 증가 시킵니다. 고혈압은 신체에 경고 신호나 자각 증상이 없어 많은 사람들이 자신이 고혈압인 것을 인지하지 못하기 때문에 "사일런트 킬러"라 불리웁니다. 이러한 이유로 정기적으로 쉽고 편리하게 혈압을 확인할 수 있는 기술의 개발이 매우 중요합니다. 생체의학 데이터 분석 분야에서는 머신 러닝을 대량으로 수집된 생체의학 빅 데이터에 적용하는 다양한 연구가 효과적으로 이루어지고 있습니다. 그러나 빅 데이터 수준으로 다량의 혈압 관련 데이터를 수집하는 것은 많은 전문적인 인력들이 오랜시간을 필요로 하기 때문에 매우 어렵고 비용 또한 많이 필요합니다. 따라서 본 학위논문에서는 이러한 문제를 극복하기 위한 3단계 전략을 제안했습니다. 먼저 누구나 시용할 수 있도록 공개되어 있는 심전도, 광용적맥파 데이터셋을 이용, 순차적인 심전도, 광용적맥파 신호에서 혈압을 잘 예측하도록 고안된 추출 및 농축 작업을 반복하는 함성곱 신경망 구조를 제안했습니다. 두번째로 제안된 합성곱 신경망 모델을 개인에게서 측정한 광용적맥파 신호를 이용해 제안된 함성곱 신경망 모델의 성능을 평가했습니다. 세번째로 혈압예측 모델의 정확성을 높이기 위해 지식 증류법과 입력신호 전처리 방법을 제안했습니다. 이 논문에서 제안된 모든 혈압예측 방법은 합성곱 신경망을 기반으로 합니다. 혈압 예측에 필요한 특징들을 수동으로 추출해야 하는 다른 연구들과 다르게 특징을 자동으로 추출하는 딥러닝의 장점을 활용, 아무런 처리도 하지 않은 원래 그대로의 생체 신호에서 신호 자체의 고유한 특징을 반영할 수 있습니다.1 Introduction 1 2 Background 5 2.1 Cuff-based BP measurement methods 9 2.1.1 Auscultatory method 9 2.1.2 Oscillometric method 10 2.1.3 Tonometric method 11 2.2 Biomedical signals used in cuffless BP prediction methods 13 2.2.1 Electrocardiography (ECG) 13 2.2.2 Photoplethysmography (PPG) 20 2.3 Cuffless BP measurement methods 21 2.3.1 PWV based BP prediction methods 25 2.3.2 Machine learning based pulse wave analysis methods 26 2.4 Deep learning for sequential biomedical data 30 2.4.1 Convolutional neural networks 31 2.4.2 Recurrent neural networks 32 3 End-to-end blood pressure prediction via fully convolutional networks 33 3.1 Introduction 35 3.2 Method 38 3.2.1 Data preparation 38 3.2.2 CNN based prediction model 41 3.2.3 Detailed architecture 45 3.3 Experimental results 47 3.3.1 Setup 47 3.3.2 Model evaluation & selection 48 3.3.3 Calibration-based method 51 3.3.4 Performance comparison 52 3.3.5 Verification using international standards for BP measurement grading criteria 54 3.3.6 Performance comparison by the input signal combinations 56 3.3.7 An ablation study of each architectural component of extraction-concentration blocks 58 3.3.8 Preprocessing of input signal to improve blood pressure prediction performance 59 3.4 Discussion 61 3.5 Summary 63 4 Blood pressure prediction by a smartphone sensor using fully convolutional networks 64 4.1 Introduction 66 4.2 Method 69 4.2.1 Data acquisition 71 4.2.2 Preprocessing of the PPG signals 71 4.2.3 PPG signal selection 71 4.2.4 Data preparation for CNN model training 72 4.2.5 Network architectures 72 4.3 Experimental results 75 4.3.1 Implementation details 75 4.3.2 Effect of PPG combination on BP prediction 75 4.3.3 Performance comparison with other related works 76 4.3.4 Verification using international standards for BP measurement grading criteria 77 4.3.5 Preprocessing of input signal to improve blood pressure prediction performance 79 4.4 Discussion 81 4.5 Summary 83 5 Improving accuracy of blood pressure prediction by distilling the knowledge of neural networks 84 5.1 Introduction 85 5.2 Methods 87 5.3 Experimental results 88 5.4 Discussion & Summary 89 6 Conclusion 90 6.1 Future work 92 Bibliography 93 Abstract (In Korean) 106Docto

Neural Recurrent Approches to Noninvasive Blood Pressure Estimation

4This paper presents a comparison between two recurrent neural networks (RNN) for arterial blood pressure (ABP) estimation. ABP is a parameter closely related to the cardiac activity, for this reason its monitoring implies decreasing the risk of heart disease. In order to predict the ABP values (both systolic and diastolic), electrocardiographic (ECG) and photoplethysmographic (PPG) signals are used, separately, as inputs of the networks. To train the artificial neural networks, the synchronized signals are extracted from the Physionet MIMIC database. The output-error Neural networks (NNOE) and the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) architectures are compared in terms of RMSE and absolute error. NNOE neural network, with ECG signal as input, results the best configuration in terms of both the proposed metrics. The predicted ABP falls within the values of the normative ANSI/AAMI/ ISO 81060-2:2013 for sphygmomanometer certification.partially_openopenAnnunziata Paviglianiti; Vincenzo Randazzo; Giansalvo Cirrincione; Eros PaseroPaviglianiti, Annunziata; Randazzo, Vincenzo; Cirrincione, Giansalvo; Pasero, EROS GIAN ALESSANDR

Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation

The blood pressure is an important factor in the diagnosis and evaluation of several diseases, such as acute myocardial infarction and stroke. This way, continuous monitorization of this parameter is crucial to a correct health evaluation. The current methods, like the oscillometric method, have some major drawbacks, that can influence the output values or even make the measurements impossible. One example is the high frequency evaluation of the blood pressure, in the standard used methods the process of measuring can take up to 3 minutes, and a waiting time is necessary between consecutive measurements. This dissertation presents two different cuffless solution to solve those problems. One based on physical models of the human body, and the other using machine learning techniques. In the first solution seven models that correlate pulse transit time and blood pressure, deducted by different authors, were tested to evaluate which one performed better. The testes were performed in a custom dataset acquired at Fraunhofer AICOS and in clinical environment, with two different devices (low cost device and medical grade device). The results indicate that pulse transit time can be used to track blood pressure, the developed device/method was evaluated as grade A based in the Standard IEEE 1708-2014. The second solution it’s a proof of concept using a public database and three different machine learning methods (Random Forest, Neural Network and AdaBoost). Two sets of features are calculated from the ECG and PPG signals, one using TSFEL (spectral, frequency and time domain features) and a total of 15 custom features. The proposed method outperforms the methods presented in bibliography with mean absolute error of 3.6 mmHg and 2.0 mmHg to systolic and diastolic blood pressure respectively

The 2023 wearable photoplethysmography roadmap

Photoplethysmography is a key sensing technology which is used in wearable devices such as smartwatches and fitness trackers. Currently, photoplethysmography sensors are used to monitor physiological parameters including heart rate and heart rhythm, and to track activities like sleep and exercise. Yet, wearable photoplethysmography has potential to provide much more information on health and wellbeing, which could inform clinical decision making. This Roadmap outlines directions for research and development to realise the full potential of wearable photoplethysmography. Experts discuss key topics within the areas of sensor design, signal processing, clinical applications, and research directions. Their perspectives provide valuable guidance to researchers developing wearable photoplethysmography technology

Improving Maternal and Fetal Cardiac Monitoring Using Artificial Intelligence

Early diagnosis of possible risks in the physiological status of fetus and mother during pregnancy and delivery is critical and can reduce mortality and morbidity. For example, early detection of life-threatening congenital heart disease may increase survival rate and reduce morbidity while allowing parents to make informed decisions. To study cardiac function, a variety of signals are required to be collected. In practice, several heart monitoring methods, such as electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmography (PPG), are commonly performed. Although there are several methods for monitoring fetal and maternal health, research is currently underway to enhance the mobility, accuracy, automation, and noise resistance of these methods to be used extensively, even at home. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help to design a precise and convenient monitoring system. To achieve the goals, the following objectives are defined in this research: The first step for a signal acquisition system is to obtain high-quality signals. As the first objective, a signal processing scheme is explored to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of signals and extract the desired signal from a noisy one with negative SNR (i.e., power of noise is greater than signal). It is worth mentioning that ECG and PPG signals are sensitive to noise from a variety of sources, increasing the risk of misunderstanding and interfering with the diagnostic process. The noises typically arise from power line interference, white noise, electrode contact noise, muscle contraction, baseline wandering, instrument noise, motion artifacts, electrosurgical noise. Even a slight variation in the obtained ECG waveform can impair the understanding of the patient's heart condition and affect the treatment procedure. Recent solutions, such as adaptive and blind source separation (BSS) algorithms, still have drawbacks, such as the need for noise or desired signal model, tuning and calibration, and inefficiency when dealing with excessively noisy signals. Therefore, the final goal of this step is to develop a robust algorithm that can estimate noise, even when SNR is negative, using the BSS method and remove it based on an adaptive filter. The second objective is defined for monitoring maternal and fetal ECG. Previous methods that were non-invasive used maternal abdominal ECG (MECG) for extracting fetal ECG (FECG). These methods need to be calibrated to generalize well. In other words, for each new subject, a calibration with a trustable device is required, which makes it difficult and time-consuming. The calibration is also susceptible to errors. We explore deep learning (DL) models for domain mapping, such as Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks, to map MECG to fetal ECG (FECG) and vice versa. The advantages of the proposed DL method over state-of-the-art approaches, such as adaptive filters or blind source separation, are that the proposed method is generalized well on unseen subjects. Moreover, it does not need calibration and is not sensitive to the heart rate variability of mother and fetal; it can also handle low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. Thirdly, AI-based system that can measure continuous systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) with minimum electrode requirements is explored. The most common method of measuring blood pressure is using cuff-based equipment, which cannot monitor blood pressure continuously, requires calibration, and is difficult to use. Other solutions use a synchronized ECG and PPG combination, which is still inconvenient and challenging to synchronize. The proposed method overcomes those issues and only uses PPG signal, comparing to other solutions. Using only PPG for blood pressure is more convenient since it is only one electrode on the finger where its acquisition is more resilient against error due to movement. The fourth objective is to detect anomalies on FECG data. The requirement of thousands of manually annotated samples is a concern for state-of-the-art detection systems, especially for fetal ECG (FECG), where there are few publicly available FECG datasets annotated for each FECG beat. Therefore, we will utilize active learning and transfer-learning concept to train a FECG anomaly detection system with the least training samples and high accuracy. In this part, a model is trained for detecting ECG anomalies in adults. Later this model is trained to detect anomalies on FECG. We only select more influential samples from the training set for training, which leads to training with the least effort. Because of physician shortages and rural geography, pregnant women's ability to get prenatal care might be improved through remote monitoring, especially when access to prenatal care is limited. Increased compliance with prenatal treatment and linked care amongst various providers are two possible benefits of remote monitoring. If recorded signals are transmitted correctly, maternal and fetal remote monitoring can be effective. Therefore, the last objective is to design a compression algorithm that can compress signals (like ECG) with a higher ratio than state-of-the-art and perform decompression fast without distortion. The proposed compression is fast thanks to the time domain B-Spline approach, and compressed data can be used for visualization and monitoring without decompression owing to the B-spline properties. Moreover, the stochastic optimization is designed to retain the signal quality and does not distort signal for diagnosis purposes while having a high compression ratio. In summary, components for creating an end-to-end system for day-to-day maternal and fetal cardiac monitoring can be envisioned as a mix of all tasks listed above. PPG and ECG recorded from the mother can be denoised using deconvolution strategy. Then, compression can be employed for transmitting signal. The trained CycleGAN model can be used for extracting FECG from MECG. Then, trained model using active transfer learning can detect anomaly on both MECG and FECG. Simultaneously, maternal BP is retrieved from the PPG signal. This information can be used for monitoring the cardiac status of mother and fetus, and also can be used for filling reports such as partogram

Deep Learning Algorithms for Time Series Analysis of Cardiovascular Monitoring Systems

This thesis investigates and develops methods to enable ubiquitous monitoring of the most examined cardiovascular signs, blood pressure, and heart rate. Their continuous measurement can help improve health outcomes, such as the detection of hypertension, heart attack, or stroke, which are the leading causes of death and disability. Recent research into wearable blood pressure monitors sought predominately to utilise a hypothesised relationship with pulse transit time, relying on quasiperiodic pulse event extractions from photoplethysmography local signal characteristics and often used only a fraction of typically bivariate time series. This limitation has been addressed in this thesis by developing methods to acquire and utilise fused multivariate time series without the need for manual feature engineering by leveraging recent advances in data science and deep learning methods that showed great data analysis potential in other domains

Blood pressure estimation with complexity features from electrocardiogram and photoplethysmogram signals

A novel method for the continual, cuff-less estimation of the systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) values based on signal complexity analysis of the photoplethysmogram (PPG) and the electrocardiogram (ECG) is reported. The proposed framework estimates the blood pressure (BP) values obtained from signals generated from 14 volunteers subjected to a series of exercise routines. Herein, the physiological signals were first pre-processed, followed by the extraction of complexity features from both the PPG and ECG. Subsequently the complexity features were used in regression models (artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM) and LASSO) to predict the BP. The performance of the approach was evaluated by calculating the mean absolute error and the standard deviation of the predicted results and compared with the recommendations made by the British Hypertension Society (BHS) and Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation. Complexity features from the ECG and PPG were investigated independently, along with the combined dataset. It was observed that the complexity features obtained from the combination of ECG and PPG signals resulted to an improved estimation accuracy for the BP. The most accurate DBP result of 5.15 ± 6.46 mmHg was obtained from ANN model, and SVM generated the most accurate prediction for the SBP which was estimated as 7.33 ± 9.53 mmHg. Results for DBP fall within recommended performance of the BHS but SBP is outside the range. Although initial results are promising, further improvements are required before the potential of this approach is fully realised

The Relevance of Calibration in Machine Learning-Based Hypertension Risk Assessment Combining Photoplethysmography and Electrocardiography

[EN] The detection of hypertension (HT) is of great importance for the early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), as subjects with high blood pressure (BP) are asymptomatic until advanced stages of the disease. The present study proposes a classification model to discriminate between normotensive (NTS) and hypertensive (HTS) subjects employing electrocardiographic (ECG) and photoplethysmographic (PPG) recordings as an alternative to traditional cuff-based methods. A total of 913 ECG, PPG and BP recordings from 69 subjects were analyzed. Then, signal preprocessing, fiducial points extraction and feature selection were performed, providing 17 discriminatory features, such as pulse arrival and transit times, that fed machine-learning-based classifiers. The main innovation proposed in this research uncovers the relevance of previous calibration to obtain accurate HT risk assessment. This aspect has been assessed using both close and distant time test measurements with respect to calibration. The k-nearest neighbors-classifier provided the best outcomes with an accuracy for new subjects before calibration of 51.48%. The inclusion of just one calibration measurement into the model improved classification accuracy by 30%, reaching gradually more than 96% with more than six calibration measurements. Accuracy decreased with distance to calibration, but remained outstanding even days after calibration. Thus, the use of PPG and ECG recordings combined with previous subject calibration can significantly improve discrimination between NTS and HTS individuals. This strategy could be implemented in wearable devices for HT risk assessment as well as to prevent CVDs.This research received financial support from grants PID2021-00X128525-IV0, PID2021123804OB-I00 and TED2021-129996B-I00 of the Spanish Government 10.13039/501100011033 jointly with the European Regional Development Fund (EU), SBPLY/17/180501/000411 from Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha and AICO/2021/286 from Generalitat Valenciana.Cano, J.; Fácila, L.; Gracia-Baena, JM.; Zangróniz, R.; Alcaraz, R.; Rieta, JJ. (2022). The Relevance of Calibration in Machine Learning-Based Hypertension Risk Assessment Combining Photoplethysmography and Electrocardiography. Biosensors. 12(5):1-14. https://doi.org/10.3390/bios1205028911412