Piecewise-linear trend detection in longitudinal physiological measurements

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2009:2009:3413-6. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2009.5332406.

Abstract

Recently, telecare solutions have been demonstrated as an effective means of monitoring chronic disease at a distance. A clinician may be managing many tens or hundreds of remote patients, prompting the need for a decision support system (DSS) to provide a more automated approach to managing these vast amounts of data. While simple threshold-based alert techniques provide some utility in notifying clinicians of extreme out-of-range parameter values, more incipient changes in a subject's condition may be sooner recognized by identifying trends in the longitudinal parameter data. Here we describe an approach for obtaining a piecewise-linear fit, to longitudinal physiological trend data, comparable with a similar fitting performed by a human observer, using a graphical user interface. The technique has been applied to both simulated and real data, and a comparison performed against the human scoring for each. On simulated data, the method matches or betters the human performance in most cases; with the greatest improvement observed in more noisy data. Similarly, for real physiological data, the deviation from the human marking, as a fraction of total variability of the signal, is less than 0.35.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Automation
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computer Simulation
  • Decision Support Systems, Clinical*
  • Decision Support Techniques
  • Humans
  • Normal Distribution
  • Regression Analysis
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Software
  • Telemedicine / instrumentation*
  • Telemedicine / methods*
  • Time Factors
  • User-Computer Interface