Signal processing : application of PPG in cardiovascular diagnosis

Abstract

Photoplethysmography (PPG) signal is becoming popular in biomedical research and diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease, which can be simply obtained by a low-cost technique detecting blood volume changes in the micro vascular bed of tissue. Through human’s history, cardiovascular disease is always the major cause of death in many countries and continues to be. In Singapore, there are 32% of deaths resulting from heart diseases in 2008. This is also the reason why people put more and more attention into PPG technique. Its pulse contains abundant cardiovascular information and plays a key role in cardiovascular system valuation, which helps for heart evaluation, function monitoring, disease diagnosis and treatment. My FYP attempts to extract as much as readable information about PPG signal, estimate some blood flow parameters non-invasively from PPG signal, such as cardiac output, stroke volume and heart rate, assess microcirculation status and estimate age, for assisting doctors in diagnosis and assisting patients to understand. Also I would like to design easy-use software, making use of these research results. At the end, suggestions for further research and development are put forward.