Automated Detection of Perturbed Cardiac Physiology During Oral Food Allergen Challenge in Children

Abstract

This paper investigates the fully automated computer-based detection of allergic reaction in oral food challenges using pediatric ECG signals. Nonallergic background is modeled using a mixture of Gaussians during oral food challenges, and the model likelihoods are used to determine whether a subject is allergic to a food type. The system performance is assessed on the dataset of 24 children (15 allergic and 9 nonallergic) totaling 34 h of data. The proposed detector correctly classified all nonallergic subjects (100% specificity) and 12 allergic subjects (80% sensitivity) and is capable of detecting allergy on average 17 min earlier than trained clinicians during oral food challenges, the gold standard of allergy diagnosis. Inclusion of the developed allergy classification platform during oral food challenges recorded would result in a 30% reduction of doses administered to allergic subjects. The results of study introduce the possibility to halt challenges earlier which can safely advance the state of clinical art of allergy diagnosis by reducing the overall exposure to the allergens.

Cardiovascular changes during peanut-induced allergic reactions in human subjects

“…We hypothesize that this decrease in cardiac preload drives a compensatory increase in peripheral vasoconstriction and HR, which maintains CO. The changes in HRV are consistent with sympathetic activation and similar to those reported in a pediatric population 19 ; however, they were not reproduced at repeat food challenge. HRV has also been related to emotional arousal and responds to anxiety in a manner similar to that observed with sympathetic activation.…”

Delayed symptoms and orthostatic intolerance following peanut challenge

“…For example, the allergic reaction may have caused a disturbance in normal postural circulatory reflexes, akin to the blunting of postural reflexes which is often observed during anaesthesia 19 . Orthostatic hypotension is associated with a decrease in heart rate variability, 20,21 and previous studies in both children and adults have reported reduced heart rate variability following food‐induced allergic reactions, independent of severity 18,22 . Thus, these episodes could potentially represent a more mild form of the postural decompensation seen in some cases of fatal anaphylaxis.…”

A theoretical model of healthcare monitoring surveillance system for patients with severe allergies

“…It tests the allergic reaction when the patient takes oral food. It has identified allergic subjects 17 min earlier than the trained clinicians (Oh et al, 2015;Twomey et al, 2013). Regarding the monitoring of environmental allergens and airborne allergens (Wu et al, 2014;Bastl et al, 2016), atmospheric pressure cold plasma (APCP) treatment which includes further tests using blood sera from the allergen sensitized humans reduces the size of environmental allergens and airborne allergens and prevents the allergic diseases.…”