Wrist Pulse Analysis Based on RP and RQA

Wrist pulse waveform analysis is common in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) engineering and diagnosis modernization. Nonlinear dynamics theory has been a tool in the analysis of physiological signals containing some nonlinear and chaotic information indispensable. The chaotic properties of wrist pulse containing a wealth of human physiological and pathological information were seldom studied. An application of nonlinear qualitative and quantitative analysis method, i.e., recurrence plots (RP) and recurrence quantification analysis(RQA), to analyze the two kinds of wrist pulse time series is proposed in this paper. Both controls and patients with cardiovascular diseases, and the other kind of series of 4 common TCM pulses are analyzed by RP and RQA to extract nonlinear features, which are then used for classification and discrimination. The results from analyzing real data show the feasibility of the proposed RP and RQA method and indicate the potential of further applications to syndrome classification and diagnosis.