A Preliminary Comparison of Three Methods for the Assessment of Pulse Wave Transit Time in an Arterial Simulator

Abstract

Arterial simulators are useful tools to reproduce the Pulse Wave Velocity (PWV) behavior depending on vessel characteristics. This quantity is related to the Pulse Transit Time (PTT), i.e., the time interval required for the pulse wave to travel between two sites in a vessel. In the literature, there is a lack of comparison of PTT evaluation methods from signals acquired through arterial simulators. In the present study, three PTT estimation methods (peak-to-peak, tangent-secant and cross-correlation) have been applied to two signals simulating the pressure wave traveling in an Arterial Surrogate (AS) over time. Tests have been repeated for different imposed delays between the generated waveforms. From the obtained results, the cross-correlation method showed the lowest discrepancy values between estimated and imposed time delay.