RESUMO
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Pulse signals contain a wealth of human physiological and pathological information. How to get full pulse information is especially challenging, and most of the traditional pulse sensors can only get the pulse wave of a single point. This study is aimed at developing a binocular pulse detection system and method to obtain multipoint pulse waves and dynamic three-dimensional pulse shape of the radial artery. METHODS: The proposed pulse detection approach is image-based and implemented by two steps. First, a new binocular pulse detection system is developed based on the principle of pulse feeling used in traditional Chinese medicine. Second, pulse detection is achieved based on theories and methods of binocular vision and digital image processing. In detail, the sequences of pulse images collected by the designed system as experimental data are sequentially processed by median filtering, block binarization and inversion, area filtering, centroids extraction of connected regions, to extract the pattern centroids as feature points. Then stereo matching is realized by a proposed algorithm based on Gong-shape scan detection. After multipoint spatial coordinate calculation, dynamic three-dimensional reconstruction of the thin film shape is completed by linear interpolation. And then the three-dimensional pulse shape is achieved by finding an appropriate reference time. Meanwhile, extraction of multipoint pulse waves of the radial artery is accomplished by using a suitable reference origin. The proposed method is analyzed from three aspects, which are pulse amplitude, pulse rate and pulse shape, and compared with other detection methods. RESULTS: Analysis of the results shows that the values of pulse amplitude and pulse rate are consistent with the characteristics of pulse wave of the radial artery, and pulse shape can correctly present the shape of pulse in space and its change trend in time. The comparison results with the other two previously proposed methods further verify the correctness of the presented method. CONCLUSIONS: The designed binocular pulse detection system and proposed algorithm can effectively detect pulse information. This tactile visualization-based pulse detection method has important scientific significance and broad application prospects and will promote further development of objective pulse diagnosis.