UTransBPNet: A General Deep Learning Model for Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation under Activities

Abstract

<p>Cuffless blood pressure (BP) monitoring has gained great attention in the past twenty years considering its significant benefits in cardiovascular healthcare. However, the main challenge of this technology is the inaccurate BP modeling under activities, i.e., existing work have either been inappropriately validated with sufficient intra-individual BP variations, or did not show promising estimation accuracy under activities. In this study, a novel deep learning model <em>UTransBPNet</em>, featured in short- and long-range feature representation, is proposed aiming to improve the estimation accuracy and tracking capability of intra-individual BP changes under activities. The model performance was comprehensively evaluated in three different datasets, i.e., one public dataset (Dataset_MIMIC) and two datasets under daily activities (Dataset_Drink and Dataset_Exercise). Under subject-independent validation, the model achieved state-of-the-art performance in the Dataset_MIMIC, with the mean absolute differences (MADs) for systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) of 4.38 and 2.25 mmHg, respectively. In addition, the model achieved strong tracking capability of intra-individual BP variations under activities, with the individual Pearson’ correlation coefficients for SBP and DBP of 0.61±0.17 and 0.62±0.13 (Dataset_Drink), 0.82±0.11 and 0.72±0.18 (Dataset_Exercise), respectively. Moreover, this study for the first time tested the generalization capability across different activities, and showed that with small-sized scenario-specific data for finetuning, our model showed good cross-scenario generalization capability which however degraded significantly when there are differences in the BP distribution and variation patterns between the datasets. In conclusion, <em>UTransBPNet</em> is generally a very promising deep learning model for accurate cuffless BP estimation and tracking BP changes. Future work should further investigate the influence of BP distribution and variation patterns on the generalization capability for building effective training dataset. </p>