A Method for Predicting the Main Indicators of Cardiopulmonary Stress Testing for Patients with Chronic Heart Failure

Abstract

Introduction. Cardiopulmonary stress test provides significant diagnostic and prognostic information of the condition of patients with cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases. There is a serious problem, that final phase of stress testing is a physically difficult exercise for a person. There is a significant risk of occurrence and development of pathological conditions of the patient's cardiovascular system. One of the solutions is the development of methods for assessing the biological parameters of the patients at the end of a load protocol based on data from the initial stages of the test.Aim. Development of a method for finding an estimate of the maximum heart rate (HR) and of the peak oxygen consumption (OC) for the patients with chronic heart failure at the end of a cardiorespiratory exercise stress test, based on the results of the study obtained at the first initial stages of the test.Materials and methods. For the study, 149 anonymized records of rhythmograms and data of changes in the oxygen consumption of the patients with chronic heart failure were used. The patients underwent a cardiopulmonary stress test by a bicycle ergometer using step-by-step load protocol (the load power increase at each stage was 10 W, the duration of the load stage was 1 min)Results. Based on the analysis of the data obtained, a method for assessing the peak values of HR and of PC of the patients with chronic heart failure was developed.Conclusion. The relative error of the proposed estimate of the HR peak in most cases was no more than 10 %, which allows it to be used for practical purposes. It was established that when performing 70 % of the stress protocol, the error of the proposed estimate of the OC peak in most cases did not exceed 20 %. More research is needed to improve the accuracy of the assessment for using in medical applications aimed to the modernization of methods and equipment for stress testing of the patients.