Robust Feature Selection for BP Estimation in Multiple Populations: Towards Cuffless Ambulatory BP Monitoring


Loading...

Date

2024-10

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric

Data

Abstract

Current blood pressure (BP) estimation methods have not achieved an accurate and adaptable approach for ambulatory diagnosis and monitoring applications of populations at risk of cardiovascular disease, generally due to a limited sample size. This paper introduces an algorithm for BP estimation solely reliant on photoplethysmography (PPG) signals and demographic features. It automatically obtains signal features and employs the Markov Blanket (MB) feature selection to discern informative and transmissible features, achieving a robust space adaptable to the population shift. This approach was validated with the Aurora-BP database, compromising ambulatory wearable cuffless BP measurements for over 500 individuals. After evaluating several machine-learning regression methods, Gradient Boosting emerged as the most effective. According to the MB feature selection, temporal, frequency, and demographic features ranked highest in importance, while statistical ones were deemed non-significant. A comparative assessment of a generic model (trained on unclassified BP data) and specialized models (tailored to each distinct BP population), demonstrated a consistent superiority of our proposed MB feature space with a mean absolute error of 10.2 mmHg (0.28) for systolic BP and 6.7 mmHg (0.18) for diastolic BP on the whole dataset. Moreover, we present a first comparison of in-clinic vs. ambulatory models, with performance significantly lower for the latter with a drop of 2.85 mmHg in systolic (p < 0.0001) and 2.82 mmHg for diastolic (p < 0.0001) estimation errors. This work contributes to the resilient understanding of BP estimation algorithms from PPG signals, providing causal features in the signal and quantifying the disparities between ambulatory and in-clinic measurements.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

28 (10)

Pages / Article No.

5768 - 5779

Publisher

IEEE

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

blood pressure monitoring; biosignal processing; PPG signal analysis; Machine learning (artificial intelligence); Feature engineering

Organisational unit

03654 - Riener, Robert / Riener, Robert check_circle

Notes

This study was partially funded by the Schweizer Paraplegiker Stiftung (SPS) and the ETH Zürich Foundation through the 2021-HS-348 ETH-SPS Digital Transformation in Personalized Healthcare for SCI.

Funding

Related publications and datasets

Is new version of: