New analysis techniques for blood pressure biomedical signals

Finapres Medical Systems design and manufacture a range of non-invasive cardiovascular monitoring devices, which are widely used in the assessment and diagnosis of a variety of medical conditions. These systems have the capability of providing ASCII output of the blood pressure and heart rate trace. This ASCII output allows the reproduction and analysis of the blood pressure traces in third party software. In this work, was used to investigate the potential of different signal processing and expert systems approaches to enhance the diagnostic capability of the system. Initially, attempts were made to improve the readability of the signal by the application of signal filtering algorithms. New techniques for automatically extracting information from the blood pressure traces were also developed. These techniques were applied to the blood pressure traces of a number of patients, with a variety of medical conditions, recorded during head up tilt testing sessions at the Clinical Age Assessment Unit at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad. Finally, a statistical analysis was performed on the data extracted in an attempt to better understand some of the underlying mechanisms of orthostatic intolerance.