IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2016 Mar;20(2):450-9. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2015.2392132. Epub 2015 Jan 15.
Pulse diagnosis, recognized as an important branch of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), has a long history for health diagnosis. Certain features in the pulse are known to be related with the physiological status, which have been identified as biomarkers. In recent years, an electronic equipment is designed to obtain the valuable information inside pulse. Single-point pulse acquisition platform has the benefit of low cost and flexibility, but is time consuming in operation and not standardized in pulse location. The pulse system with a single-type sensor is easy to implement, but is limited in extracting sufficient pulse information. This paper proposes a novel system with optimal design that is special for pulse diagnosis. We combine a pressure sensor with a photoelectric sensor array to make a multichannel sensor fusion structure. Then, the optimal pulse signal processing methods and sensor fusion strategy are introduced for the feature extraction. Finally, the developed optimal pulse system and methods are tested on pulse database acquired from the healthy subjects and the patients known to be afflicted with diabetes. The experimental results indicate that the classification accuracy is increased significantly under the optimal design and also demonstrate that the developed pulse system with multichannel sensors fusion is more effective than the previous pulse acquisition platforms.
脉诊作为中医的一个重要分支，在健康诊断方面有着悠久的历史。已知脉搏的某些特征与生理状态有关，这些特征已被确定为生物标志物。近年来，人们设计了一种电子设备来获取脉搏内部的有价值信息。单点脉搏采集平台具有成本低、灵活性好的优点，但操作耗时且脉搏位置不规范。单传感器的脉搏系统易于实现，但在提取足够的脉搏信息方面受到限制。本文提出了一种专门用于脉诊的新型优化设计系统。我们将压力传感器和光电传感器阵列结合起来，构成了一种多通道传感器融合结构。然后，介绍了最优的脉搏信号处理方法和传感器融合策略，用于特征提取。最后，在从健康受试者和已知患有糖尿病的患者获得的脉搏数据库上对开发的最优脉搏系统和方法进行了测试。实验结果表明，在最优设计下，分类精度显著提高，也表明多通道传感器融合的开发的脉搏系统比以前的脉搏采集平台更有效。
