Investigating Optimal Intermittent Pneumatic Compression Timing Across Two Days

Intermittent pneumatic compression (IPC) systems are employed to treat vascular diseases. It has been shown that applying cardiac-gated compression effectively enhances femoral blood velocity (BV), but the optimal compression timing likely varies between individuals and may vary over time. While a previous work has shown the usability of one heartbeat ahead BV estimation to optimize the compression timing, that study was limited to a single treatment session and the BV estimator performance may deteriorate for the next sessions. Therefore, the goal of this study is to develop BV estimators and evaluate their accuracy over a longer time-scale. Six participants wore a custom IPC system and experienced random cardiac-gated compression timings for 1.5 hours per day for two days. A data- driven model was trained on electrocardiogram and applied pressure data to predict femoral BV one heartbeat ahead in a closed loop manner. The mean R
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for this model across participants on the second session was 0.74 ± 0.09 and the mean absolute error was approximately 3%, which is a reduction of only 11% compared to the first sessions, for both metrics. This study is the first to show that BV across IPC sessions can be predicted using a pre-trained model. This work may lead to a significant improvement in IPC performance with only an initial model training session.