Scale-independent measures and pathologic cardiac dynamics.

Amaral, LAN, Goldberger, AL, Ivanov, PC, Stanley, HE.
Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 2388-2391 (1998)

Times cited: 89

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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.