Detection of Onset, Systolic Peak and Dicrotic Notch in Arterial Blood Pressure Pulses

In this paper, we proposed an effective method for detecting fiducial points in arterial blood pressure pulses. An arterial blood pressure pulse normally consists of onset, systolic peak and dicrotic notch. Detection of fiducial points in blood pressure pulses is a critical task and has many potential applications. The proposed method employs empirical wavelet transform for locating the systolic peak and onset of blood pressure pulse. The proposed method first estimates the fundamental frequency of blood pressure pulse using empirical wavelet transform and utilizes the combination of the blood pressure pulse and the estimated frequency for locating onset and systolic peak. For dicrotic notch detection, it utilizes the first-order difference of blood pressure pulse. The algorithm was validated on various open-source databases and was tested on a data set containing 12,230 beats. Two benchmark parameters such as sensitivity and positive predictivity were used for the performance evaluation. The comparison results for accuracy of the detection of systolic peak, onset and dicrotic notch are reported. The proposed method attained a sensitivity and positive predictivity of 99.95% and 99.97%, respectively, for systolic peaks. For onsets, it attained a sensitivity and predictivity of 99.88% and 99.92%, respectively. For dicrotic notches, a sensitivity and positive predictivity of 98.98% and 98.81% were achieved, respectively.