Artefacts in standard and time-dependent spectral analysis of arterial blood pressure signals obtained by Finapres: importance and correction.

The non-invasive Finapres (finger arterial pressure) device is widely used for the measurement of arterial blood pressure (BP) in BP variability studies, in particular in experimental studies. In our work, we have noticed that the calibration pauses of the Finapres, occurring approximately every 80 heart beats, introduce artefacts in standard and time-dependent spectral analysis of the arterial BP signal. This report describes these artefacts and indicates their dependence on the heart rate (HR) of the subject. In standard spectral analysis, they appear principally for low HR subjects, whereas in time-dependent spectral analysis, they distort the time-dependent spectrum both for low and high HR subjects. A possible correction procedure is presented which eliminates these pauses, causing minimal distortion from the original arterial BP time series. This correction keeps the total time-duration of the corrected signal equal to that of the original signal, thus allowing reliable spectral analysis of arterial BP fluctuations to be performed.