Finding the area under the curve on a blood pressure versus time graph

by Christopher Arnold

 

Submitted : Fall 2015

When discussing applications of Calculus in the world of medicine, there is one particular aspect that is used very frequently: the area under the curve. In this field, the area under the curve is used when dealing with certain curves, and is meant to find the differences between a distributions of values, and is used very frequently in the field of Pharmacology. For this project, a set of values representing the systolic blood pressure levels of a patient suffering from a severe case heart of failure was plotted onto a graph using Microsoft Excel, creating a parabola. From there, a function for the parabola was derived using Excel’s functions, which would be used to obtain the area under the curve. To obtain the area, it was necessary to find the definitive integral of the function, using the time intervals as our (a, b) values. Using this definitive integral, it was possible to calculate the area under the curve, which turned out to be a large value. The results showed that the method worked in obtaining the area in this particular case, and that learning this method would allow someone to understand how other scientists obtain the area under a ROC curve.

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