An early respiratory distress detection method with Markov models

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Hariharan Ravishankar, Aditya Saha, Gokul Swamy, Sahika Genc

Published: 01 Jan 2014, Last Modified: 03 Oct 2025EMBC 2014EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: A method for early detection of respiratory distress in hospitalized patients which is based on a multi-parametric analysis of respiration rate (RR) and pulse oximetry (SpO2) data trends to ascertain patterns of patient instability pertaining to respiratory distress is described. Current practices of triggering caregiver alerts are based on simple numeric threshold breaches of SpO2. The pathophysiological patterns of respiratory distress leading to in-hospital deaths are much more complex to be detected by numeric thresholds. Our pattern detection algorithm is based on a Markov model framework based on multi-parameter pathophysiological patterns of respiratory distress, and triggers in a timely manner and prior to the violation of SpO2 85-90% threshold, providing additional lead time to attempt to reverse the deteriorating state of the patient. We present the performance of the algorithm on MIMIC II dataset resulting in true positive rate of 92% and false positive rate of 6%.