Autonomic Dysreflexia (AD) poses a life-threatening condition for individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI). Its implications can profoundly undermine the long-term prognosis for SCI patients and exacerbate their physical condition. Delayed intervention in AD can precipitate severe, even fatal consequences. Insight into the interplay between AD and pivotal physiological factors can equip clinicians and experts with more preventive measures and timely alert against occurrences of AD. At the present, interpretable, comprehensive studies and understandings of AD are scarce and typically the temporal patterns are overlooked. In this study we aim to furnish a comprehensive and complete framework elucidating the causal relationships between some key physiological factors and AD. The adoption of graphical models provides an interpretable and explainable data-driven analysis. Leveraging data from wearable sensors and multi-modalities, we conducted a simultaneous exploration employing dynamic causal discovery methods to unveil the dynamic causal graph of AD. This dynamic causal graph enables the identification of pivotal early triggers and factors leading to AD. This not only fosters a more comprehensive representation of individual body dynamics within the SCI population but also more insightful views on the temporal stages of AD. Moreover, despite the acknowledgement of individual disparities, we introduce a dynamic graph aggregation technique, enriching our insights into the general population. Furthermore, a metric is introduced to assess the stationarity of the causal mechanism within individuals, complemented by a sliding window approach. Our investigation underscores bladder distension as a direct cause to AD, while also accentuating the significance of oxygen saturation, electrodermal activity, and skin temperature as early indicators of heightened blood pressure, potentially preceding the onset of AD.
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Autonomic Dysreflexia (AD) poses a life-threatening condition for individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI). Its implications can profoundly undermine the long-term prognosis for SCI patients and exacerbate their physical condition. Delayed intervention in AD can precipitate severe, even fatal consequences. Insight into the interplay between AD and pivotal physiological factors can equip clinicians and experts with more preventive measures and timely alert against occurrences of AD. At the prese...
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