Identification of cerebral artery stenosis using bilateral photoplethysmography

Cerebral artery stenosis is currently diagnosed by transcranial Doppler (TCD), computed tomographic angiography (CTA), or magnetic resonance angiography (MRA). CTA exposes a patient to radiation, while CTA and MRA are invasive and side effects were related to contrast medium use. This study aims to provide a technique that can simply discriminate between people with normal blood vessels and those with cerebral artery stenosis using photoplethysmography (PPG), which is noninvasive and inexpensive. Moreover, the measurement takes only 120 seconds and is conducted on the fingers. The technique projects the light of a specific wavelength and analyzes the pulse waves which are generated when the blood passes through the blood vessels according to one's heartbeat using the transmitted light. Normalization was performed after dividing the extracted pulse waveform into windows, and maximum positive and negative amplitudes (MPA, MNA) were extracted from the detected pulse waves as features. The extracted features were used to identify normal subjects and those with cerebral artery stenosis using a linear discriminant analysis. The study results showed that the recognition rate using MPA was 92.2%, MNA was 90.6%, and combined MPA+MNA was 90.6%. The technique proposed is expected to detect early stage asymptomatic cerebral artery stenosis and help prevent ischemic stroke.