Pulmonary & Respiratory Medicine

Depicting Respiratory Characteristics of Blood Pressure Signal by Using Empirical Mode Decomposition

Abstract

Chia-Chi Chang, Tzu-Chien Hsiao and Hung-Yi Hsu

Aim: To explore adequate parameters for EMD of ABP signal; to determine the intrinsic characteristics of ABP waveform through the analysis of IMFs’ averaged period and its energy density; to examine the effect of different respiration patterns on IMFs extracted from ABP waveform by CEEMD.

Arterial blood pressure (ABP) reflects cardiac function, vessel compliance, and cardiorespiratory interaction and ABP analysis provides the estimators of this physiological information. But it is inconvenient for quantitative ABP assessment due to several influences, such as respiration. Recently, a novel adaptive method, called empirical mode decomposition (EMD), was proposed, and it was useful for non-stationary intrinsic characteristics extraction. Though some literatures examined that EMD helps for physiological signal analysis study, the method applied for ABP signal still needs further investigation. This study proposed a standard procedure of specific EMD for ABP intrinsic characterization during spontaneous breathing, 6-cycle breathing, and hyperventilation. The extracted components, called intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), were determined with the examined parameters, including ensemble number, added noise, and the stop criterion. The IMFs of ABP signal were categorized into five major intrinsic components, including the noise and irregular fluctuation (IMF1), beat-to-beat cardiac intervals (IMF2), characteristics of pressure waveform morphology (IMF3), base beat (IMF4), and respiratory related fluctuation (IMF5 and IMF6).

The results showd that the characteristics of IMFs were quantified by averaged period and corresponding energy density with good reproducibility. The proposed algorithm produced meaningful IMFs representing the cardiac rhythm, intrinsic waveform mophology, and the intrinsic influence of respiration fluctuations. EMD helps for analyzing the underlying mechanisms of control processes, including cardiorespiratory coupling and interactions among organ systems at multiple time scales.

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