Empirical wavelet transform-based delineator for arterial blood pressure waveforms

Abstract Arterial blood pressure (ABP) waveforms provide plenty of pathophysiological information about the cardiovascular system. ABP pulse analysis is a routine process used to investigate the health status of the cardiovascular system. ABP pulses correspond to the contraction and relaxation phenomena of the human heart. The contracting or pumping phase of the cardiac chamber corresponds to systolic pressure, whereas the resting or filling phase of the cardiac chamber corresponds to diastolic pressure. An ABP waveform commonly comprises systolic peak, diastolic onset, dicrotic notch, and dicrotic peak. Automatic ABP delineation is extremely important for various biomedical applications. In this paper, a delineator for onset and systolic peak detection in ABP signals is presented. The algorithm uses a recently developed empirical wavelet transform (EWT) for the delineation of arterial blood pulses. EWT is a new mathematical tool used to decompose a given signal into different modes and is based on the design of an adaptive wavelet filter bank. The performance of the proposed delineator is evaluated and validated over ABP waveforms of standard databases, such as the MIT-BIH Polysomnoghaphic Database, Fantasia Database, and Multiparameter Intelligent Monitoring in Intensive Care Database. In terms of pulse onset detection, the proposed delineator achieved an average error rate of 0.11%, sensitivity of 99.95%, and positive predictivity of 99.92%. In a similar manner for systolic peak detection, the proposed delineator achieved an average error rate of 0.10%, sensitivity of 99.96%, and positive predictivity of 99.92%.