Identifying depressed patients with and without suicidal ideation by finger photo-plethysmography

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a serious mental disorder that if untreated not only affects physical health but also has a high risk of suicide. While the neurophysiological phenomena that contribute to the formation of Suicidal Ideation (SI) are still ill-defined, clear links between MDD and cardiovascular disease have been reported. The aim of this study is to extract suitable features from arterial pulse signals with a view to predicting SI within MDD and control groups. Sixteen unmedicated MDD patients with a history of SI (MDDSI+), sixteen without SI (MDDSI-) and twenty-nine healthy subjects (CONT) were recruited at a psychiatric clinic in the UAE. Depression severity and SI were assessed using the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale and Beck Depression Inventory. Pulse Wave Amplitude (PWA) was calculated as the difference between the peak (Systole) and the valley (Diastole) of the arterial pulse within each cardiac cycle. Then, 2D Tone-Entropy (TE) features were extracted from the Systole, Diastole and PWA time series. The TE features extracted from Diastole were the best markers for predicting MDDSI+. The overall classification accuracies of Classification and Regression Tree (CART) model by using TE features of Systole, Diastole and PWA were 88.52%, 90.2% and 88.52% respectively. When all TE features were combined, accuracy increased up to 93.44% in identifying MDDSI+/MDDSI-/Control groups.