MP1 - Photoplethysmographic Imaging for the Evaluation of Peripheral Blood Perfusion in a Clinical Setting

The ability to provide non-contact monitoring of blood perfusion, in patients susceptible to diseases such as diabetic foot, is exceptionally useful in a clinical setting. Recently, this has become achievable through a widely-used technique known as photoplethysmography. After extensively reviewing the literature on clinical applications for photoplethysymography, we began to explore the potential for objectively identifying central points of perfusion within tissue, by attempting to fit a variety of distributions to a photoplethysmography dataset. Due to the inherent noise in the data, this approach proved ineffective and so we reduced the noise in the data by utilising a three-by-three pixel neighbourhood outlier filtering technique, which was effective. A photoplethysmography blood perfusion monitoring technique was then applied to a patient with diabetes. This dataset highlighted the issues of movement artefacts to us, as the photoplethysmography results were severely perturbed by the patient’s involuntary foot tremor.