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M. Bachler, B. Hametner, S. Wassertheurer:
"Increasing Stability of Real-Time Pulse Wave Velocity Estimation by Combining Established and New Approaches";
in: "EUROSIM 2013 8th EUROSIM Congress on Modelling and Simulation", K. Al-Begain, D. Al Dabass, A. Orsoni, R. Cant, R. Zobel (ed.); issued by: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.,; EUROSIM 2013 8th EUROSIM Congress on Modelling and Simulation, Cardiff, 2013, ISBN: 978-0-7695-5073-2, 47 - 51.

Abstract-Pulse wave velocity (PWV) in arteries is an
estimator for arterial stiffness. As velocity is calculated as
distance per time, the accuracy and reliability of PWV
measurements depends heavily on the estimation of the pulse
transit time (PTT). Several methods for the estimation of the
PTT exist, often resulting in different PWV values. They rely
on the exact determination of specific points in the pulse wave,
which are easily affected by small changes of the signal. As
there is still no agreement on the accuracy of these methods,
only the reliability and stability of these commonly used "footto-
foot" algorithms are compared in this paper. These
algorithms are based on the detection of the diastole-minimum,
the maximum of the first or second derivative or combinations
thereof. We also adapted a new approach called "diastolepatching"
based on the matching of a specific region of the
pulse waves. The methods were tested using 2348 pulse waves
from the MIMIC Database, collected from 46 subjects. Intrasubject
deviation and relative outliers per subject were lowest
in the adapted diastole-patching algorithm (4.9 ± 3ms and
0.6 ± 2.7%, respectively). Therefore, this study has shown that
the diastole-patching method is the most stable and reliable of
the algorithms under investigation.

wave velocity; pulse transit time; foot-tofoot; arterial stiffness