Hybrid Artifact Detection System for Minute Resolution Blood Pressure Signals from ICU

Physiological monitoring in intensive care units generates data that can be used to aid clinical decision making facilitating early interventions. However, the low data quality of physiological signals due to the recording conditions in clinical settings limits the automated extraction of relevant information and leads to significant numbers of false alarms. This paper investigates the utilization of a hybrid artifact detection system that combines a Variational Autoencoder with a statistical detection component for the labeling of artifactual samples to automate the costly process of cleaning physiological recordings. The system is applied to mean blood pressure signals from an intensive care unit dataset recorded within the scope of the KidsBrainIT project. Its performance is benchmarked to manual annotations made by trained researchers. Our preliminary results indicate that the system is capable of consistently achieving sensitivity and specificity levels that surpass 90%. Thus, it provides an initial foundation that can be expanded upon to partially automate data cleaning in offline applications and reduce false alarms in online applications.