🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the challenge of preserving waveform morphology and dynamic variations when estimating blood pressure from single-channel photoplethysmography (PPG). We propose a cuffless continuous blood pressure monitoring method based on an attention-enhanced 1D U-Net. By designing a composite morphology-aware objective function that combines range-weighted SmoothL1 loss with window-based regularization, the approach amplifies high-dynamic segment features while suppressing amplitude errors, enabling precise PPG-to-arterial blood pressure waveform reconstruction and direct systolic/diastolic blood pressure (SBP/DBP) estimation. Experimental results demonstrate mean absolute errors of 2.46 mmHg for SBP and 1.46 mmHg for DBP, achieving a 30.4% relative error reduction over the MSE baseline and satisfying both AAMI and BHS Grade A clinical standards.
📝 Abstract
Continuous cuffless blood pressure (BP) monitoring from photoplethysmography (PPG) has strong potential for wearable health and telemonitoring, but accurate estimation remains difficult because PPG-to-BP mapping must preserve subtle waveform morphology and pressure-range-dependent dynamics. We introduce ExpertoRhythm, an attention-enhanced 1D U-Net that reconstructs the arterial blood pressure (ABP) waveform from a single-channel PPG signal and derives systolic and diastolic BP directly from the reconstructed waveform. The central contribution is a composite morphology-aware learning objective that integrates range-weighted SmoothL1 reconstruction with a window-range regularizer to emphasize high-dynamic BP segments and reduce amplitude under/over-shoot. On the UCI cuff-less BP dataset with 942 subjects, ExpertoRhythm achieves 2.46/1.46 mmHg MAE for systolic/diastolic BP (SBP/DBP), while obtaining a 30.4% average relative error reduction over pure MSE across waveform reconstruction and BP estimation metrics. Clinical-style evaluation further demonstrates low bias and strong agreement across the BP range, including high-pressure windows up to 200 mmHg, satisfying AAMI criteria and achieving BHS Grade A. These results suggest that morphology-aware waveform reconstruction from a single PPG channel can provide an accurate and practical pathway toward continuous cuffless BP monitoring in wearable and remote-care settings.