Non-invasive Pressure Estimation in Patients with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension: Data-Driven or Model-Based?

Right heart catheterisation is considered as the gold standard for the assessment of patients with suspected pulmonary hypertension. It provides clinicians with meaningful data, such as pulmonary capillary wedge pressure and pulmonary vascular resistance, however its usage is limited due to its invasive nature. Non-invasive alternatives, like Doppler echocardiography could present insightful measurements of right heart but lack detailed information related to pulmonary vasculature. In order to explore non-invasive means, we studied a dataset of 95 pulmonary hypertension patients, which includes measurements from echocardiography and from right-heart catheterisation. We used data extracted from echocardiography to conduct cardiac circulation model personalisation and tested its prediction power of catheter data. Standard machine learning methods were also investigated for pulmonary artery pressure prediction. Our preliminary results demonstrated the potential prediction power of both data-driven and model-based approaches.