A Lossless Characteristic Compression Method for Continuous Arterial Pulse Waveforms

Arterial blood pressure is one of the important biomedical waveforms that possess lots of important clinical and pathological information. This paper aims in designing a technique, which is called characteristic compression method, to perform almost loss less data compression for the continuous arterial blood pressure waveforms. This method uses the spline function to interpolate the original waveform at preselected sample points first. A fourth order spline function is considered with associated formulas in describing the coefficients of the function. A second stage compression is accompanied by using 12-bit digital data representation to store sample points and coefficients for each interval. Numerical simulation confirms that the proposed technique is feasible and does provide a very high compression rate and almost loss less reconstruction for the continuous arterial pulse wave.