Novel metrics for tracking blood pressure changes incontinuous cuffless blood pressure estimations

Abstract

Abstract Recent studies revealed the importance of tracking continuous blood pressure (BP) changes in monitoring and controlling hypertension and diagnosing cardiovascular diseases. However, current evaluation protocols utilize distance measures as primary metrics, which cannot properly evaluate the ability of the estimation model to track BP changes. This paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation framework which evaluates the distance and trend similarity metrics, and the composite metric of both between the reference and estimated BPs. The results of applying both widely used conventional metrics and the new proposed metrics for BP estimations are demonstrated in an example of comparing the reference with a set of different BP estimations. Then, the metrics are applied to BP estimations obtained using state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms. It is shown that even though SOTA algorithms have a low mean and standard deviation of absolute difference, they are not capable of tracking short-term blood pressure changes. Additionally, the proposed metrics are normalized metrics and range from -1 to 1, making them intuitively interpretable, similar to well-known correlation coefficients. Therefore, we suggest that the proposed evaluation framework should be used regularly in evaluating continuous BP monitoring systems.