Dynamic Estimation of Cerebral Blood Flow Using Photoplethysmography Signal during Simulated Apnea

Monitoring apnea-induced cerebral blood flow oscillations is of importance for assessing apnea patient brain health. Using an autoregressive moving average model, peak and trough values of cerebral blood flow were estimated from a concurrently recorded forehead photoplethysmography signal. Preliminary testing of the method in 7 subjects (4 F, 32±4 yrs., BMI 24.57±3.87 kg/m²) using a breath hold paradigm for simulating apnea shows that maximum mean and standard deviation of the prediction error is -1.10±8.49 cm/s and the maximum root mean squared of the error is 8.92 cm/s.