Optimization and validation of a suprasystolic brachial cuff-based method for noninvasively estimating central aortic blood pressure

Clinical studies have extensively demonstrated that central aortic blood pressure (CABP) has greater clinical significance in comparison with peripheral blood pressure. Despite the existence of various techniques for noninvasively measuring CABP, the clinical applications of most techniques are hampered by the unsatisfactory accuracy or large variability in measurement errors. In this study, we proposed a new method for noninvasively estimating CABP with improved accuracy and reduced uncertain errors. The main idea was to optimize the estimation of the pulse wave transit time from the aorta to the occluded lumen of the brachial artery under a suprasystolic cuff by identifying and utilizing the characteristic information of the cuff oscillation wave, thereby improving the accuracy and stability of the CABP estimation algorithms under various physiological conditions. The method was firstly developed and verified based on large-scale virtual subject data (n = 800) generated by a computational model of the cardiovascular system coupled to a brachial cuff, and then validated with small-scale in vivo data (n = 34). The estimation errors for the aortic systolic pressure were −0.05 ± 0.63 mmHg in the test group of the virtual subjects and −1.09 ± 3.70 mmHg in the test group of the patients, both demonstrating a good performance. In particular, the estimation errors were found to be insensitive to variations in hemodynamic conditions and cardiovascular properties, manifesting the high robustness of the method. The method may have promising clinical applicability, although further validation studies with larger-scale clinical data remain necessary.