Accurate automatic noninvasive assessment of blood pressure (BP) presents a challenge due to conditions like arrhythmias, obesity, and postural changes that tend to obfuscate arterial amplitude pulsations sensed by the cuff. Researchers tried to overcome this challenge by analyzing oscillometric pulses with the aid of a higher fidelity signal-the electrocardiogram (ECG). Moreover, pulse transit time (PTT) was employed to provide an additional method for BP estimation. However, these methods were not fully developed, suitably integrated, or tested. To address these issues, we present a novel method whereby ECG-assisted oscillometric and PTT (measured between ECG R-peaks and maximum slope of arterial pulse peaks) analyses are seamlessly integrated into the oscillometric BP measurement paradigm. The method bolsters oscillometric analysis (amplitude modulation) with more reliable ECG R-peaks provides a complementary measure with PTT analysis (temporal modulation) and fuses this information for robust BP estimation. We have integrated this technology into a prototype that comprises a BP cuff with an embedded conductive fabric ECG electrode, associated hardware, and algorithms. A pilot study has been undertaken on ten healthy subjects (150 recordings) to validate the performance of our prototype against United States Food and Drug Administration approved Omron oscillometric monitor (HEM-790IT). Our prototype achieves mean absolute difference of less than 5 mmHg and grade A as per the British Hypertension Society protocol for estimating BP, with the reference Omron monitor.
Current noninvasive blood pressure (BP) measurement methods, such as the oscillometric method, estimate the systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP and DBP) at two random instants in time and do not take into account the natural variability in BP. The standard for automated BP devices sets a maximum allowable system error of ±5 mmHg, even though natural BP variability often exceeds these limits. This paper proposes a new approach using simultaneous recordings of the oscillometric and continuous arterial pulse waveforms to augment the conventional noninvasive measurement by providing (1) the mean SBP and DBP over the measurement interval and the associated confidence intervals of the mean, (2) the standard deviation of SBP and DBP over the measurement interval, which indicates the degree of fluctuation in BP and (3) an indicator as to whether or not the oscillometric reading is an outlier. Recordings with healthy subjects demonstrate the potential utility of this approach to characterize BP, to detect outlier measurements, and that it does not suffer from bias relative to the conventional oscillometric method.
We present a prototype of an integrated blood pressure (BP) and electrocardiogram (ECG) device for multi-parameter physiologic monitoring. A standard BP pressure cuff and an ordinary wristband have been modified to incorporate in them dry ECG electrodes made of thin conductive fabric. The modified BP cuff and wristband are coupled with commercially available hardware and software to harvest simultaneous arterial pulse wave and ECG data from the arm and wrist of the other hand. Software has been written for assessing multiple physiologic parameters from the harvested pulse wave and ECG signals. We provide an initial validation of the performance of our prototype by conducting a study on six healthy subjects.
There were no significant differences between using a high-speed CT and using a slow-rotation CT for attenuation correction of SPECT myocardial perfusion images.
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