An automatic systolic peak detector of blood pressure waveforms using 4th order cumulants

Abstract

The arterial blood pressure (ABP) holds a lot of information about the cardiovascular system. To analyse the ABP signal, at first the pulse wave has to be detected correctly. Due to influences, e.g. of noise, an accurate beat detection is a challenging task. In this work, a novel real-time ABP detector based on higher-order statistics is presented. The method uses the 4th order cumulants for ABP-peak detection. To evaluate this detector, the Fantasia database freely available at physionet was used. In this database, 142,936 systolic peaks were available to check the efficiency of the beat detector. A sensitivity of 99.91% and a positive predictive value of 99.50% were achieved with the novel method.

Keywords

• blood pressure
• detection
• higher-order statistic
• 4th order cumulant