A portable, wireless photoplethysomography (PPG) sensor for assessing arteriovenous fistula (AVF) by using class-weighted support vector machines (SVM) was presented in this study. Nowadays, in hospital, AVF are assessed by ultrasound Doppler machines, which are bulky, expensive, complicated-to-operate, and time-consuming. In this study, new PPG sensors were proposed and developed successfully to provide portable and inexpensive solutions for AVF assessments. To develop the sensor, at first, by combining the dimensionless number analysis and the optical Beer Lambert's law, five input features were derived for the SVM classifier. In the next step, to increase the signal-noise ratio (SNR) of PPG signals, the front-end readout circuitries were designed to fully use the dynamic range of analog-digital converter (ADC) by controlling the circuitries gain and the light intensity of light emitted diode (LED). Digital signal processing algorithms were proposed next to check and fix signal anomalies. Finally, the class-weighted SVM classifiers employed five different kernel functions to assess AVF quality. The assessment results were provided to doctors for diagonosis and detemining ensuing proper treatments. The experimental results showed that the proposed PPG sensors successfully achieved an accuracy of 89.11% in assessing health of AVF and with a type II error of only 9.59%.
Keywords: arteriovenous fistula (AVF); photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor; support vector machine (SVM).