An automatic method for arterial pulse waveform recognition using KNN and SVM classifiers

The measurement and analysis of the arterial pulse waveform (APW) are the means for cardiovascular risk assessment. Optical sensors represent an attractive instrumental solution to APW assessment due to their truly non-contact nature that makes the measurement of the skin surface displacement possible, especially at the carotid artery site. In this work, an automatic method to extract and classify the acquired data of APW signals and noise segments was proposed. Two classifiers were implemented: k-nearest neighbours and support vector machine (SVM), and a comparative study was made, considering widely used performance metrics. This work represents a wide study in feature creation for APW. A pool of 37 features was extracted and split in different subsets: amplitude features, time domain statistics, wavelet features, cross-correlation features and frequency domain statistics. The support vector machine recursive feature elimination was implemented for feature selection in order to identify the most relevant feature. The best result (0.952 accuracy) in discrimination between signals and noise was obtained for the SVM classifier with an optimal feature subset .