Cardiovascular risk analysis by means of pulse morphology and clustering methodologies

The purpose of this study was the development of a clustering methodology to deal with arterial pressure waveform (APW) parameters to be used in the cardiovascular risk assessment. One hundred sixteen subjects were monitored and divided into two groups. The first one (23 hypertensive subjects) was analyzed using APW and biochemical parameters, while the remaining 93 healthy subjects were only evaluated through APW parameters. The expectation maximization (EM) and k-means algorithms were used in the cluster analysis, and the risk scores (the Framingham Risk Score (FRS), the Systematic COronary Risk Evaluation (SCORE) project, the Assessing cardiovascular risk using Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (ASSIGN) and the PROspective Cardiovascular Münster (PROCAM)), commonly used in clinical practice were selected to the cluster risk validation. The result from the clustering risk analysis showed a very significant correlation with ASSIGN (r = 0.582, p < 0.01) and a significant correlation with FRS (r = 0.458, p < 0.05). The results from the comparison of both groups also allowed to identify the cluster with higher cardiovascular risk in the healthy group. These results give new insights to explore this methodology in future scoring trials.