Assessment of arteriosclerosis based on lognormal fitting

Objective: Pulse pressure waves contain information about human physiology. There is a need for a simple, accurate way to know cardiovascular health in the clinic, so as to realize the implementation of convenient and effective early health monitoring for patients with arteriosclerosis.

Approach: This study proposes an arteriosclerosis assessment method based on fitting a lognormal function, along with improving a conventional electronic sphygmomanometer. During the deflation phase of blood pressure measurement, the cuff pressure was kept constant (40 mmHg) and an additional 10 s of pulse signal was acquired. To derive the pulse pressure waveforms for a single cycle, the acquired pulse data of 101 cases were preprocessed in this study, including filtering for noise removal, onset point identification, removal of baseline drift, and normalization. In this study, an improved pulse resolution algorithm is proposed for the multimodal problem of the pulse wave, combining waveform matching and threshold setting, and finally obtaining the resolution parameters of the lognormal function with an average error (MAE) less than 1.5 %.

Main results: According to the correlation analysis, the resolved parameters A1, W2, C2, W3, and C3 were significantly correlated with ba-PWV, and the absolute correlation range in 0.17- 0.53, which can be used as a reference index for arteriosclerosis. An arteriosclerosis assessment model was constructed based on the support vector mechanism, and the prediction accuracy was 91.1%.

Significance: This study provides a new solution idea for the arteriosclerosis assessment method as well as the pulse resolution algorithm, which has a greater reference value.