A simple method for reconstruction of continuous brachial artery pressure from continuous digital artery pressure in humans.

This paper presents a practical approach to reconstruct brachial artery pressure (BAP) distally from digital artery pressure (DAP). We hypothesize that continuous BAP can simply be approximated by sum of two halves of the continuous DAP shifted by the time delay. In order to test it, we enrolled 30 healthy volunteers for two experiments. We firstly showed that the pressure wave in the digital artery can be considered twice as much as the forward/backward wave in the finger. A simplified individualized transfer function was then derived so as to estimate BAP from DAP. Finally, by comparing with a reference BAP, we found that the proposed method can correct the DAP. The errors of the proposed method in estimating systolic and diastolic pressures are 2.82±3.58 and -2.32±4.06 mmHg, respectively. These results agree with the standard of Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI). Our method is therefore promising in estimating continuous proximal blood pressure from peripheral blood pressure in practice.