Cross-Domain Joint Dictionary Learning for ECG Inference From PPG

The inverse problem of inferring clinical gold-standard electrocardiogram (ECG) from photoplethysmogram (PPG) that can be measured by affordable wearable Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) devices is a research direction receiving growing attention. It combines the easy measurability of PPG and the rich clinical knowledge of ECG for long-term continuous cardiac monitoring. The prior art for reconstruction using a universal basis, such as discrete cosine transform (DCT), has limited fidelity for uncommon ECG shapes due to the lack of representative power. To better utilize the data and improve data representation, we design two dictionary learning frameworks, the cross-domain joint dictionary learning (XDJDL), and the label-consistent XDJDL (LC-XDJDL), to further improve the ECG inference quality and enrich the PPG-based diagnosis knowledge. Building on the K-SVD technique, the proposed joint dictionary learning frameworks extend the expressive power by optimizing simultaneously a pair of signal dictionaries for PPG and ECG with the transforms to relate their sparse codes and disease information. The proposed models are evaluated with a variety of PPG and ECG morphologies from two benchmark datasets that cover various age groups and disease types. The results show the proposed frameworks achieve better inference performance than previous methods with average Pearson coefficients being 0.88 using XDJDL and 0.92 using LC-XDJDL, suggesting an encouraging potential for ECG screening using PPG based on the proactively learned PPG-ECG relationship. By enabling the dynamic monitoring and analysis of the health status of an individual, the proposed frameworks contribute to the emerging digital twins paradigm for personalized healthcare.