Title: Evaluation of forced expiratory volume prediction in spirometric test using Principal Component Analysis

Authors: Anandan Kavitha, Manoharan Sujatha, Swaminathan Ramakrishnan

Addresses: Department of Instrumentation Engineering, Madras Institute of Technology Campus, Anna University, Chennai 600044, India. ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, CEG Campus, Anna University, Chennai 600044, India. ' Biomedical Engineering Group, Department of Applied Mechanics, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India

Abstract: In this work, an attempt has been made to evaluate the clinical relevance of lung function spirometric test using neural network based prediction and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Flow–volume curves generated using spirometer on subjects (N = 175) under standard recording protocol were used for the present study. The most significant spirometric parameter FEV1 predicted using Radial basis function neural networks (RBFNN) incorporating k-means clustering method was considered further for analysing the interdependency of spirometric parameters. PCA was performed on the measured and predicted datasets to analyse the interdependency among the parameters. Results demonstrate that PCA confirms the consistency in prediction of FEV1 for normal subjects. It appears that this method of prediction and principal component analysis could be useful in explaining the significance of FEV1 in assessing the lung function abnormalities for spirometric pulmonary function test with incomplete data.

Keywords: pulmonary function test; flow–volume spirometry; forced expiratory manoeuvre; RBF neural networks; PCA; principal component analysis; lung function abnormalities; incomplete data.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBET.2011.039203

International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, 2011 Vol.5 No.2/3, pp.292 - 301

Published online: 21 Jan 2015 *

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