next up previous

Entropies, Partitionings and Heart Rate Variability

Milan Palus
Institute of Computer Science, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
Pod vodárenskou vezí 2, 182 07 Prague 8, Czech Republic
E-mail: mp@uivt.cas.cz, mp@santafe.edu

Jan J. Zebrowski
Institute of Physics, Warsaw University of Technology
ul. Koszykowa 75, 00-662 Warszawa, Poland

E-mail: zebra@if.pw.edu.pl

Abstract:

Several definitions of static entropies and coarse-grained entropy rates CER's were used to analyze 24-hour RR interval sequences of three sex, age and disease matched control pairs. The matching was done with the assessment of the risk of cardiac arrest in mind. Details of estimating probability densities (histograms), used to compute the static entropies, have been found crucial to obtain the proper discrimination between the members of control pairs. The effect of signal variance on the entropy estimation is discussed. In a preliminary result, CER's have been found to yield additional information which may be helpful in discriminating health and pathology.







Milan Palus
January 1997