Frequency interpretation of tidal peak in intracranial pressure wave.

A new approach to locate different components of ICP signal for each cardiac induced ICP beat is presented. In this method an initial timing map is used to define the appropriate part of the ICP wave which should be searched for the specific component. In parallel a recently proposed method was used to decompose the ICP wave to its different frequency harmonics. This algorithm, which is based on tracking the amplitude of the harmonic components using Kalman filtering, brings both heart rate variability and cardiorespiratory interaction into account and provides good time and frequency resolution. Comparing the results of two methods for seventeen ICP records, each one hour long, it has been observed that the fundamental cardiac component has the most significant contribution in the construction of the tidal peak in ICP and therefore tracking of this harmonic could be informative of the tidal peak evolution over the time.