Detection of artifacts in oscillometric pulsations signals

A measurement of blood pressure is a basic diagnostic technique for examining of the cardiovascular system. There are a lot of methods for determination of the blood pressure, but an oscillometric measurement (investigation of oscillometric pulsations) is one of the most frequent methods used in modern electronic tonometers. The results given by oscillometric measurements are very dependent on the cleanness of the signal. The method is very sensitive for example for motion artifacts, which produce significant damage of the signal. For the proper processing of the signal it is very important to detect all artifacts precisely before signal processing. The paper deals with the methods for artifacts detection in oscillometric pulsations signals. The methods based on predicted heart rate detection, heart rate variability (standard deviation method) and comparison of oscillometric pulsations with ECG signal are described in the paper. The section Results includes a comparison of the methods and a discussion of their advantages and disadvantages. The authors conclude that the algorithm based on detection of heart rate variability (standard deviation method) seems as the most suitable algorithm for automated detection of artifacts in the signal of oscillometric pulsations.