PPGSynth: An innovative toolbox for synthesizing regular and irregular photoplethysmography waveforms

Qunfeng Tang; Zhencheng Chen; John Allen; Aymen Alian; Carlo Menin; Rabab Ward; Mohamed Elgendi

doi:10.3389/fmed.2020.597774

PPGSynth: An innovative toolbox for synthesizing regular and irregular photoplethysmography waveforms

Qunfeng Tang, Zhencheng Chen, John Allen, Aymen Alian, Carlo Menin, Rabab Ward, Mohamed Elgendi

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Abstract

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is increasingly used in digital health, exceptionally in smartwatches. The PPG signal contains valuable information about heart activity, and there is lots of research interest in its means and analysis for cardiovascular diseases. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, there is no arrhythmic PPG dataset publicly available—this paper attempt to provide a toolbox that can generate synthesized arrhythmic PPG signals. The model of a single PPG pulse in this toolbox utilizes two combined Gaussian functions. This toolbox supports synthesizing PPG waveform with regular heartbeats and three irregular heartbeats: compensation, interpolation, and reset. The user can generate a large amount of PPG data with a certain irregularity, with different sampling frequency, time length, and a range of noise types (Gaussian noise and multi-frequency noise) can be added to the synthesized PPG which can all be modified from the interface, and different types of arrhythmic PPGs (as calculated by the model) generated. The generation for large PPG datasets that simulate PPG collected from real humans could be used for testing the robustness of developed algorithms that are targeting arrhythmic PPG signals. Our PPG synthesis tool is publicly available.

Original language	English
Article number	597774
Number of pages	7
Journal	Frontiers in Medicine
Volume	7
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2020.597774
Publication status	Published - 2 Nov 2020

Bibliographical note

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Funder

NSERC grant RGPIN-2014-04462 and Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program. RW was supported by NPRP grant # NPRP12S-0305-190231 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation).

Keywords

PPG construction
big data
biosignal generation
data generation
data modeling
digital health
generative model
signal simulation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Medicine(all)

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.3389/fmed.2020.597774Licence: CC BY

PublishedFinal published version, 1.24 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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title = "PPGSynth: An innovative toolbox for synthesizing regular and irregular photoplethysmography waveforms",

abstract = "Photoplethysmography (PPG) is increasingly used in digital health, exceptionally in smartwatches. The PPG signal contains valuable information about heart activity, and there is lots of research interest in its means and analysis for cardiovascular diseases. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, there is no arrhythmic PPG dataset publicly available—this paper attempt to provide a toolbox that can generate synthesized arrhythmic PPG signals. The model of a single PPG pulse in this toolbox utilizes two combined Gaussian functions. This toolbox supports synthesizing PPG waveform with regular heartbeats and three irregular heartbeats: compensation, interpolation, and reset. The user can generate a large amount of PPG data with a certain irregularity, with different sampling frequency, time length, and a range of noise types (Gaussian noise and multi-frequency noise) can be added to the synthesized PPG which can all be modified from the interface, and different types of arrhythmic PPGs (as calculated by the model) generated. The generation for large PPG datasets that simulate PPG collected from real humans could be used for testing the robustness of developed algorithms that are targeting arrhythmic PPG signals. Our PPG synthesis tool is publicly available.",

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PPGSynth: An innovative toolbox for synthesizing regular and irregular photoplethysmography waveforms

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funder

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

UN SDGs

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