Expert Hypertension Detection System Featuring Pulse Plethysmograph Signals and Hybrid Feature Selection and Reduction Scheme

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 21; no. 1; p. 247
• Main Authors: Khan, Muhammad Umar, Aziz, Sumair, Akram, Tallha, Amjad, Fatima, Iqtidar, Khushbakht, Nam, Yunyoung, Khan, Muhammad Attique
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 02.01.2021; MDPI
• Subjects: Accuracy; Adult; Aged; Algorithms; biomedical signal processing; Blood pressure; Cardiovascular disease; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Datasets; Deep learning; Diabetes; Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; Discriminant analysis; Electrocardiography; empirical mode decomposition; feature extraction; Feature selection; feature selection and reduction; Female; Heart Rate; Humans; Hypertension; Hypertension - diagnosis; Machine Learning; Male; Middle Aged; Morphology; Principal components analysis; pulse plethysmograph; Sensors; Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; Wavelet transforms; United States > US; Pakistan; pulse plethysmograph; empirical mode decomposition; feature extraction; biomedical signal processing; feature selection and reduction; discrete wavelet transform; machine learning; hypertension
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s21010247

Hypertension is an antecedent to cardiac disorders. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of people affected with hypertension will reach around 1.56 billion by 2025. Early detection of hypertension is imperative to prevent the complications caused by cardiac abnormalities. Hypertension usually possesses no apparent detectable symptoms; hence, the control rate is significantly low. Computer-aided diagnosis based on machine learning and signal analysis has recently been applied to identify biomarkers for the accurate prediction of hypertension. This research proposes a new expert hypertension detection system (EHDS) from pulse plethysmograph (PuPG) signals for the categorization of normal and hypertension. The PuPG signal data set, including rich information of cardiac activity, was acquired from healthy and hypertensive subjects. The raw PuPG signals were preprocessed through empirical mode decomposition (EMD) by decomposing a signal into its constituent components. A combination of multi-domain features was extracted from the preprocessed PuPG signal. The features exhibiting high discriminative characteristics were selected and reduced through a proposed hybrid feature selection and reduction (HFSR) scheme. Selected features were subjected to various classification methods in a comparative fashion in which the best performance of 99.4% accuracy, 99.6% sensitivity, and 99.2% specificity was achieved through weighted k-nearest neighbor (KNN-W). The performance of the proposed EHDS was thoroughly assessed by tenfold cross-validation. The proposed EHDS achieved better detection performance in comparison to other electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmograph (PPG)-based methods.