A novel method for arterial blood pressure pulse detection based on a new coupling strategy and discrete wavelet transform

In this study, a new method for detection of arterial blood pressure pulses (ABP) is presented. The algorithm employs discrete wavelet transform (DWT) decomposition to extract ABP waveform features. In the proposed method, two strategies are used. In the first strategy, the algorithm uses only the DWT coefficients of ABP. The second strategy which is introduced for the first time in this paper, the coupled DWT coefficients of ABP and electrocardiogram (ECG) are used. When DWT coefficients of ECG and ABP are coupled the detection of ABP pulses is easier and more accurate in noisy parts of the signals. Furthermore, this coupling strategy is useful for the detection of ECG R-peaks since the ABP pulses make the ECG R-peaks detectable when ECG is noisy. To meet this end, adaptive thresholding and different DWT functions were employed and fitted because of different morphologies of ABP and ECG signals. The ABP-ECG delay time is measured in different recordings and set for 254 milliseconds. For evaluation, 170 recordings of the multimodal training set of PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2014 which contained both ECG and ABP waveforms were used. The first and second strategy obtained average accuracy of 87.56% and 88.53%, respectively.