A Distinguishing Arterial Pulse Waves Approach by Using Image Processing and Feature Extraction Technique

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is based on five main types of diagnoses methods consisting of inspection, auscultation, olfaction, inquiry, and palpation. The most important one is palpation also called pulse diagnosis which is to measure wrist artery pulse by doctor’s fingers for detecting patient’s health state. In this paper, it is carried out by using a specialized pulse measuring instrument to classify one’s pulse type. The measured pulse waves (MPWs) were segmented into the arterial pulse wave curve (APWC) by image proposing method. The slopes and periods among four specific points on the APWC were taken to be the pulse features. Three algorithms are proposed in this paper, which could extract these features from the APWCs and compared their differences between each of them to the average feature matrix, individually. These results show that the method proposed in this study is superior and more accurate than the previous studies. The proposed method could significantly save doctors a large amount of time, increase accuracy and decrease data volume.