Measurement of cardiovascular state using attractor reconstruction analysis

Abstract

Attractor reconstruction (AR) analysis has been used previously to quantify the variability in arterial blood pressure (ABP) signals. Since ABP signals are only available in a minority of clinical scenarios, we sought to determine whether AR could also be performed on more widely available photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals. AR analysis was performed on simultaneous ABP and PPG signals before, during and after a change in cardiovascular state. A novel quality metric was used to eliminate windows of low quality AR. A high level of agreement was found between the detected periodicity of each signal. The remaining cardiovascular parameters derived using AR analysis exhibited similar trends between the two signals in response to the change in state, although there was poor agreement between their absolute values. This demonstrates the feasibility of applying AR to the PPG signal, increasing the range of patients in whom cardiovascular state can be measured using AR analysis.