Reproducibility of blood pressure profiles

• Activity Number: 236
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Lyndia C. Brumback*+
• Companies: University of Washington
• Keywords: reproducibility ; functional data ; blood pressure

Abstract

Good reproducibility of an outcome is important for using the outcome to detect effects of interest in research studies and to guide decisions about clinical care. The reproducibility of continuous or categorical outcomes is commonly described in the medical literature. However, functional data (sequence of measurements) are often of interest and the reproducibility of functional data rarely appears in the literature. We present methods for describing the reproducibility of functional data, and apply the methods to arterial pulse waveforms. The waveform is a sequence of blood pressure measurements obtained during the cardiac cycle and may provide information about heart disease beyond the traditional discrete blood pressure measurements of systolic and diastolic blood pressure.