September 14, 1998Physical Review Letters139 citations
View Full PaperScale-Independent Measures and Pathologic Cardiac Dynamics
Key Result
Scale-independent measures of cardiac interbeat interval dynamics effectively distinguished healthy individuals from subjects with congestive heart failure.
Study Design
Type
Observational
Structured PICO
Do scale-independent measures of cardiac interbeat interval dynamics effectively distinguish healthy individuals from those with congestive heart failure?
P
Population
Database of records of interbeat intervals for a group of healthy individuals and subjects with congestive heart failure
E
Exposure
Scale-independent measures of cardiac interbeat interval dynamics using wavelet transform
C
Comparator
Scale-dependent measures
O
Outcome
Detection of heart disease (distinguishing healthy from pathologic behavior)surrogate
Scale-independent measures of interbeat interval dynamics using wavelet transforms can effectively distinguish healthy individuals from those with congestive heart failure.
Abstract
We study several scale-independent measures of cardiac interbeat interval dynamics defined through the application of the wavelet transform. We test their performance in detecting heart disease using a database consisting of records of interbeat intervals for a group of healthy individuals and subjects with congestive heart failure. We find that scale-independent measures effectively distinguish healthy from pathologic behavior and propose a new two-variable scale-independent measure that could be clinically useful. We compare the performance of a recently proposed scale-dependent measure and find that the results depend on the database analyzed and on the analyzing wavelet.