Delineation and Analysis of Seismocardiographic Systole and Diastole Profiles

Abstract: Precise estimation of fiducial points of a seismocardiogram (SCG) signal is a challenging problem for its clinical usage. Delineation techniques proposed in the existing literature do not estimate all the clinically significant points of an SCG signal, simultaneously. The aim of this research work is to propose a delineation framework to identify IM, AO, IC, AC, pAC and MO fiducial points with the help of a PPG signal. The proposed delineation method processes a wavelet-based scalographic PPG and an envelope construction scheme is proposed to estimate the prominent peaks of the PPG signal. A set of amplitude histogram based decision rules is developed for estimation of SCG diastole phases, namely AC, pAC and MO. Subsequently, the systolic phases, IM, AO and IC are detected by applying diastole masking on SCG and decision rules. Experimental results on real-time SCG signals acquired from our designed data acquisition-circuitry and their analysis show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Additionally, these estimated parameters are analyzed to show the discrimination between normal breathing and breathlessness conditions.