Contactless Respiratory Rate Monitoring for ICU Patients Based on Unsupervised Learning

Abstract

Recently, the task of contactless physiological signal monitoring based on deep learning technologies has attracted a large number of scholars. However, few studies focus on the application of real-world scenarios, especially in clinical medicine scenes. In this paper, a novel video-based contactless respiratory rate measurement algorithm is developed for the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. Firstly, a large-scale clinical real-world database towards ICU patient is collected in this study. Then, based on the dataset, the unsupervised learning is first introduced to extract the respiration waveform from the chest area of patients. Lastly, a respiratory rate estimator based on neural networks is proposed and trained on a periodical physiological signal simulation dataset, and utilizes the transfer learning technique to extract the respiratory rate from only 10-second respiration waveform. We obtained estimated respiratory rate with an MAE of 2.8 breaths/min and an STD of 3.0 breaths/min against the reference value computed from the specialized medical device. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve competitive results over state-of-the-art (SOTA) method in the real-world scenario.