Estimation of central blood pressure using peripheral upper extremity arterial blood pressure: A comparative study

In recent years, many efforts have been made to reconstruct the central blood pressure (BP) waveform from the noninvasive measurements of peripheral arterial BP. Generalized Transfer Function (GTF) is the most widely used approach for solving this problem, which adopts an average population model to describe the relationship between the BPs at the central and peripheral locations. In this paper, we compare the performance of two GTF-based methods of central BP reconstruction. In these methods, the central BP is reconstructed using the upper extremity arterial BP measurements, and the propagation process of BP from the aorta to the upper-limb peripheral site is described using the traditional transmission line (TTL) model and the segmented transmission line (STL) model, respectively. The two models were tested using leave-one-out cross-validation on 8 sets of simulated data. The results demonstrated that STL-based method performed better than the TTL-based method. The underlying reason for the improved performance is that, the STL-based method better describes the pervasive wave reflection effects in the upper-limb vessels.