Morphology variability analysis of wrist pulse waveform for assessment of arteriosclerosis status.

In this paper, approximate entropy (ApEn) is applied to study the variability of pulse waveform for assessing coronary arteriosclerosis status. Having analyzed the wrist pulse waveforms taken from both normal subjects and the patients suffering from coronary arteriosclerosis (CA) disorders, we find that pulse morphology variability (PMV) is more efficient than pulse interval variability (PIV) in assessing the conditions of human coronary artery. Usually, the PMVs of the healthy are higher than those of the patients with CA diseases, and the PMVs of patients with CA diseases have more high frequency components than those of the healthy subjects. That is to say, the CA disease also has influence on vascular tone. The effect of changes in cardiac performance due to CA disease can be reflected through the PMV. The experiment demonstrates that the specificity and sensitivity of the PMV's spectral energy ratio for clinical diagnosis of cardiovascular system is 80% and 97%, respectively.