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Multiscale Analysis of Heart Rate Variability: A Comparison of Different Complexity Measures

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Abstract

Heart rate variability (HRV) is an important dynamical variable of the cardiovascular function. There have been numerous efforts to determine whether HRV dynamics are chaotic or random, and whether certain complexity measures are capable of distinguishing healthy subjects from patients with certain cardiac disease. In this study, we employ a new multiscale complexity measure, the scale-dependent Lyapunov exponent (SDLE), to characterize the relative importance of nonlinear, chaotic, and stochastic dynamics in HRV of healthy, congestive heart failure (CHF), and atrial fibrillation subjects. We show that while HRV data of all these three types are mostly stochastic, the stochasticity is different among the three groups. Furthermore, we show that for the purpose of distinguishing healthy subjects from patients with CHF, features derived from SDLE are more effective than other complexity measures such as the Hurst parameter, the sample entropy, and the multiscale entropy.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for reviewers’ many constructive comments, which have improved the paper considerably. This work is partially supported by NSF grants CMMI-0825311 and 0826119.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PMB Intelligence LLC, P.O. Box 2077, West Lafayette, IN, 47996, USA

    Jing Hu & Jianbo Gao

  2. Affymetrix, Inc., 3380 Central Expressway, Santa Clara, CA, 95051, USA

    Jing Hu

  3. Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Wen-wen Tung

  4. BioSieve, 1026 Springfield Drive, Campbell, CA, 95008, USA

    Yinhe Cao

Authors
  1. Jing Hu
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  2. Jianbo Gao
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  3. Wen-wen Tung
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  4. Yinhe Cao
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Correspondence to Jianbo Gao.

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Hu, J., Gao, J., Tung, Ww. et al. Multiscale Analysis of Heart Rate Variability: A Comparison of Different Complexity Measures. Ann Biomed Eng 38, 854–864 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-009-9863-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-009-9863-2

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