Robust Peak Recognition in Intracranial Pressure Signals

BACKGROUND The waveform morphology of intracranial pressure pulses (ICP) is an essential indicator for monitoring, and forecasting critical intracranial and cerebrovascular pathophysiological variations. While current ICP pulse analysis frameworks offer satisfying results on most of the pulses, we observed that the performance of several of them deteriorates significantly on abnormal, or simply more challenging pulses. METHODS This paper provides two contributions to this problem. First, it introduces MOCAIP++, a generic ICP pulse processing framework that generalizes MOCAIP (Morphological Clustering and Analysis of ICP Pulse). Its strength is to integrate several peak recognition methods to describe ICP morphology, and to exploit different ICP features to improve peak recognition. Second, it investigates the effect of incorporating, automatically identified, challenging pulses into the training set of peak recognition models. RESULTS Experiments on a large dataset of ICP signals, as well as on a representative collection of sampled challenging ICP pulses, demonstrate that both contributions are complementary and significantly improve peak recognition performance in clinical conditions. CONCLUSION The proposed framework allows to extract more reliable statistics about the ICP waveform morphology on challenging pulses to investigate the predictive power of these pulses on the condition of the patient.