Continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring can produce a significant amount of digital data, which increases the chance of early diagnosis and improve the rate of survival for people diagnosed with hypertension and Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). However, mining and processing this vast amount of data are challenging. This research is aimed to address this challenge by proposing a deep learning technique, convolutional neural network (CNN), to estimate the systolic blood pressure (SBP) using electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmography (PPG) signals. Two different methods are investigated and compared in this research. In the first method, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and CNN have been employed to estimate the SBP. For the second method, we used random sampling within the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization of CNN and the raw ECG and PPG signals for training the network. The Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC III) database is used for both methods, which split to two parts, 70% for training our network and the remaining used for testing the performance of the network. Both methods are capable of learning how to extract relevant features from the signals. Therefore, there is no need for engineered feature extraction compared to previous works. Our experimental results show high accuracy for both CNN-based methods which make them promising and reliable architectures for SBP estimation.
Keywords: Continuous blood pressure; Convolutional neural network; Cuff-less blood pressure; Electrocardiogram; Photoplethysmogram.