  Efficient management of low blood pressure (BP) in preterm neonates remains
challenging with a considerable variability in clinical practice. The ability
to assess preterm wellbeing during episodes of low BP will help to decide when
and whether hypotension treatment should be initiated. This work aims to
investigate the relationship between heart rate variability (HRV), BP and the
short-term neurological outcome in preterm infants less than 32 weeks
gestational age (GA). The predictive power of common HRV features with respect
to the outcome is assessed and shown to improve when HRV is observed during
episodes of low mean arterial pressure (MAP) - with a single best feature
leading to an AUC of 0.87. Combining multiple features with a boosted decision
tree classifier achieves an AUC of 0.97. The work presents a promising step
towards the use of multimodal data in building an objective decision support
tool for clinical prediction of short-term outcome in preterms who suffer
episodes of low BP.
