It is estimated that 360,000 patients have suffered from heart failure (HF) in Taiwan, mostly those over the age of 65 years, who need long-term medication and daily healthcare to reduce the risk of mortality. The left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) is an important index to diagnose the HF. The goal of this study is to estimate the LVEF using the cardiovascular hemodynamic parameters, morphological characteristics of pulse, and bodily information with two machine learning algorithms. Twenty patients with HF who have been treated for at least six to nine months participated in this study. The self-constructing neural fuzzy inference network (SoNFIN) and XGBoost regression models were used to estimate their LVEF. A total of 193 training samples and 118 test samples were obtained. The recursive feature elimination algorithm is used to choose the optimal parameter set. The results show that the estimating root-mean-square errors (ERMS) of SoNFIN and XGBoost are 6.9 ± 2.3% and 6.4 ± 2.4%, by comparing with echocardiography as the ground truth, respectively. The benefit of this study is that the LVEF could be measured by the non-medical image method conveniently. Thus, the proposed method may arrive at an application level for clinical practice in the future.
Keywords: cardiovascular hemodynamic parameter; heart failure; left ventricular ejection fraction; machine learning; morphological characteristic of pulse.