Screening of angiotensin II dependent hypertensive patients using a linear classifier

The screening of renovascular hypertensive patients can be performed on the basis of the blood-pressure response of the patients to saralasin (Sarenin) infusion. A new approach is proposed here for the screening. The blood-pressure responses to the saralasin are modelled first, using autoregressive time series models. The constant parameters of the models are then used as the features for classifying the hypertensive patients. A linear classifier is constructed to perform the dichotomy between the angiotensin II dependent hypertensive and the rest of the hypertensive patients. Computational results on the testing of the method are presented. Although the sample size available for this study was small, the results are encouraging.