Time-domain Features of Angular-velocity Signals for Camera-based Respiratory RoI detection: A Clinical Study in NICU

Camera-based measurement of respiratory rate (RR) is emerging for preterm infants monitoring in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU). Accurate detection of respiratory region of interest (Resp-RoI), e.g. thorax and abdomen of infants, is essential for achieving a fully-automatic solution and for high-quality RR estimation. However, the application of fast Fourier transform (FFT) for detecting Resp-RoI in premature infants may not be appropriate due to their irregular breathing patterns. This study proposes a new method for detecting Resp-RoIs in premature infants that uses time-domain features of angular-velocity of respiration. By fusing respiratory motion on orthogonal directions, the proposed method is more robust to variations of infant posture in the incubator.. In addition, using inter-beat interval (IBI) features in the time domain helps to distinguish between Resp-RoI and background. The proposed method was validated on 20 preterm infants in NICU. It obtains a clear improvement on Resp-RoI detection (RoI correspondence = 0.74) and RR estimation (MAE = 3.62 bpm) against the benchmarked approaches (maxFFT: RoI correspondence = 0.45, MAE = 5.61 bpm).