dSVRI: A PPG-Based Novel Feature for Early Diagnosis of Type-II Diabetes Mellitus

Diabetes is a group of metabolic disorders characterized by hyperglycemia caused by a deficiency in insulin production, insulin action, or both. Type-II diabetes mellitus (DM-2) complications include retinopathy, cardiovascular disorder, and diabetic neuropathy. The existing works for the diagnosis of DM-2 using photoplethysmogram (PPG) utilize several time-domain features and demographic parameters of the individuals. However, the current features do not indicate a clinical correlation between DM-2 and its functional influence on cardiovascular regulation. This work proposes a novel index, called dynamic systemic vascular resistance index (dSVRI), as a feature based on systemic vascular resistance pathology to discriminate between a healthy and diabetic subject. The discrimination ability and the diagnostic performance of the proposed dSVRI were compared with the existing time-domain PPG features and its higher derivatives. In experiments with a publicly available dataset (having 219 subjects including healthy and DM-2 individuals), an accuracy of 98.52% is obtained using grid search random forest, which is significantly higher than the existing methods.