Novel Metric for Non-Invasive Beat-to-Beat Blood Pressure Measurements Demonstrates Physiological Blood Pressure Fluctuations during Pregnancy

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Beat-to-beat (B2B) variability in biomedical signals has been shown to have high diagnostic power in the treatment of various cardiovascular and autonomic disorders. In recent years, new techniques and devices have been developed to enable non-invasive blood pressure (BP) measurements. In this work, we aim to establish the concept of two-dimensional signal warping, an approved method from ECG signal processing, for non-invasive continuous BP signals. To this end, we introduce a novel BP-specific beat annotation algorithm and a B2B-BP fluctuation (B2B-BPF) metric novel for BP measurements that considers the entire BP waveform. In addition to careful validation with synthetic data, we applied the generated analysis pipeline to non-invasive continuous BP signals of 44 healthy pregnant women (30.9 ± 5.7 years) between the 21st and 30th week of gestation (WOG). In line with established variability metrics, a significant increase (p < 0.05) in B2B-BPF can be observed with advancing WOGs. Our processing pipeline enables robust extraction of B2B-BPF, demonstrates the influence of various factors such as increasing WOG or exercise on blood pressure during pregnancy, and indicates the potential of novel non-invasive biosignal sensing techniques in diagnostics. The results represent B2B-BP changes in healthy pregnant women and allow for future comparison with those signals acquired from women with hypertensive disorders.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number3151
JournalSensors
Volume24
Issue number10
Publication statusPublished - 15 May 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

unpaywall 10.3390/s24103151
PubMed 38794005
Scopus 85194218542

Keywords

Keywords

  • Humans, Female, Pregnancy, Blood Pressure/physiology, Adult, Algorithms, Blood Pressure Determination/methods, Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted, Electrocardiography/methods, Heart Rate/physiology