PulseLab: An Integrated and Expandable Toolbox for Pulse Wave Velocity-based Blood Pressure Estimation

In this paper, we introduce PulseLab, a comprehensive MATLAB toolbox that enables estimating the blood pressure (BP) from electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals using pulse wave velocity (PWV)-based models. This universal framework consists of 6 sequential modules, covering end-to-end procedures that are needed for estimating BP from raw PPG/ECG data. These modules are “dataset formation”, “signal pre-processing”, “segmentation”, "characteristic-points detection", “pulse transit time (PTT)/ pulse arrival time (PAT) calculation”, and “model validation”. The toolbox is expandable and its application programming interface (API) is built such that newly-derived PWV-BP models can be easily included. The toolbox also includes a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) offering visualization for step-by-step processing of physiological signals, position of characteristic points, PAT/PTT values, and the BP regression results. To the best of our knowledge, PulseLab is the first comprehensive toolbox that enables users to optimize their model by considering several factors along the process for obtaining the most accurate model for cuff-less BP estimation.