Study On Measurement Of Artery Stiffness Based On Digital Volume Pulse Wave

Cardiovascular disease is one of the heavy diseases which harm the humanhealth, and World Health Organization has named it as the first killer which harms thehuman health in the 21st century. The essence of cardiovascular disease is bloodvessel disease or abnormity. It helps to diagnose patient near clinic situation bydetermining arterial stiffness and large artery function at earlier period and guardagainst efficiently, so it has great science and social value.Now the non-invasive ways have both advantages and disadvantages, and theyare expensive, complex and lack of theory. The photoplethysmography is simple andcheap, it has great potential. So we use digital volume pulse (DVP) to assess largearterial stiffness. It measures arterial stiffness by analyzing contour of DVP. The aimof the article is testing its feasibility.The article did the feasibility study from two aspects of theory and experiment.About theory, we introduced knowledge about the produce theory of pulse wave,the structure of arterial vessel and its change after arteriosclerosis, the relationbetween pulse wave velocity and artery status, pressure wave transmission andreflection theory and so on. Thus we gave the theory basis of using DVP to determinethe artery stiffness by the numbers.We developed a system to determine arterial stiffness based on Visual Instrument(VI) using above theory in order to do experiment. We presented the hardware andsoftware design of the system. The emphasis of hardware is pulse wave measurecircuit, and the emphasis of software is data processing. The characteristic of VI iseasy to modify and quick to develop, so it can shorten the period of instrument designlargely. The reproducibility experiment of the system indicated it has highreproducibility and is suitable to do feasibility study.Then we validated the feasibility by experiment, including finding measurecondition and doing feasibility study. Firstly, we compared the pulse waves underdifferent conditions, then chose adaptable condition. Secondly, we chose a standardinstrument, measured arterial stiffness by our system and standard instrumentsimultaneously. We collected 33 subject examples, and found the correlationcoefficient between two instruments is 0.63. It is notable. We also discussed theinfluence of age and gender to DVP. The results showed that the DVP has differentcharacteristic with the difference of age and gender, and consequently the arterialstiffness is different. So it is a simple but acute way of measuring arterial stiffness.The issue studied a way to measure the artery stiffness, validated its feasibility intheory and experiment. It provided a simple and efficient way to guard againstarteriosclerosis.