The purpose of this study is to discuss the feasibility of establishing capsaicin pain model and the possibility to evaluate different degrees of pain by the heart rate variability (HRV). It also aims to investigate the changes of autonomic nervous activity of volunteers during the process of pain caused by capsaicin. A total of 30 volunteers were selected, who were physically and mentally healthy, into the study. To assess the effects of capsaicin on the healthy volunteers, we recorded the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) scores after the capsaicin stimulus. Additionally, the electrocardiogram signals and HRV analysis index before and after stimulating were also recorded, respectively. More specifically, the HRV analysis indexes included the time domain index, the frequency domain index, and the nonlinear analysis index. The results demonstrated that the activity of the autonomic nerves was enhanced in the process of capsaicin stimulus, especially for the sympathetic nerve, which exhibited a significantly differences in HRV. In conclusion, the degree of pain can be reflected by the HRV. It is feasible to establish a capsaicin pain model. And in further experiments, HRV analysis could be used as a reference index for quantitative evaluation of pain.
At present, the potential hazards of infrasound on heart health have been identified in previous studies, but a comprehensive review of its mechanisms is still lacking. Therefore, this paper reviews the direct and indirect effects of infrasound on cardiac function and explores the mechanisms by which it may induce cardiac abnormalities. Additionally, in order to further study infrasound waves and take effective preventive measures, this paper reviews the mechanisms of cardiac cell damage caused by infrasound exposure, including alterations in cell membrane structure, modulation of electrophysiological properties, and the biological effects triggered by neuroendocrine pathways, and assesses the impact of infrasound exposure on public health.
On the basis of Poincare scatter plot and first order difference scatter plot, a novel heart rate variability (HRV) analysis method based on scatter plots of RR intervals and first order difference of RR intervals (namely, RdR) was proposed. The abscissa of the RdR scatter plot, the x-axis, is RR intervals and the ordinate, y-axis, is the difference between successive RR intervals. The RdR scatter plot includes the information of RR intervals and the difference between successive RR intervals, which captures more HRV information. By RdR scatter plot analysis of some records of MIT-BIH arrhythmias database, we found that the scatter plot of uncoupled premature ventricular contraction (PVC), coupled ventricular bigeminy and ventricular trigeminy PVC had specific graphic characteristics. The RdR scatter plot method has higher detecting performance than the Poincare scatter plot method, and simpler and more intuitive than the first order difference method.
The analysis parameters for the characterization of heart rate variability (HRV) within a very short time (＜1 min) usually exhibit complicate variation patterns over time, which may easily interfere the judgment to the status of the cardiovascular system. In this study, long-term HRV sequence of 41 cases of healthy people (control group) and 25 cases of congestive heart failure (CHF) patients (experimental group) was divided into multiple segments of very short time series. The variation coefficient of the same HRV parameter under multiple segments of very short time series and the testing proportion with statistically significant differences under multiple interclass t-test were calculated. On this account, part of HRV analysis parameters under very short time were discussed to reveal the stability of difference of the cardiovascular system function under different status. Furthermore, with analyzing the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and modeling the artificial neural network (ANN), the classification effects of these parameters between the control group and the experimental group were assessed. The results demonstrated that ① the indices of entropy of degree distribution based on the complex network analysis had a lowest variation coefficient and was sensitive to the pathological status (in 79.75% cases, there has statistically significant differences between the control group and experimental group), which can be served as an auxiliary index for clinical doctor to diagnose for CHF patient; ② after conducting ellipse fitting to Poincare plot, in 98.5% cases, there had statistically significant differences for the ratio of ellipse short-long axis (SDratio) between the control group and the experimental group; when modeling the ANN and solely adopting SDratio, the classification accuracy to the control group and experimental group was 71.87%, which demonstrated that SDratio might be acted as the intelligent diagnosis index for CHF patients; ③ however, more sensitive and robust indices were still needed to find out for the very-short HRV analysis and for the diagnosis of CHF patients as well.
The linear analysis for heart rate variability (HRV), including time domain method, frequency domain method and timefrequency analysis, has reached a lot of consensus. The nonlinear analysis has also been widely applied in biomedical and clinical researches. However, for nonlinear HRV analysis, especially for shortterm nonlinear HRV analysis, controversy still exists, and a unified standard and conclusion has not been formed. This paper reviews and discusses three shortterm nonlinear HRV analysis methods (fractal dimension, entropy and complexity) and their principles, progresses and problems in clinical application in detail, in order to provide a reference for accurate application in clinical medicine.
In order to realize sleep staging automatically and conveniently, we used support vector machine (SVM) to analyze the correlation between heart rate variability and sleep stage experimentally. R-R intervals (RRIs) from 33 cases of sleep clinical data of Tianjin Thoracic Hospital were extracted and analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA). The SVM method was used to establish the model and predict the five sleep stages. The prediction accuracy of three-sleep-stage was higher than 80%, in contrast to sleep scoring annotations marked by physiological experts based on electroencephalogram (EEG) golden standard. The result showed that there was a good correlation between heart rate variability and sleep staging. This method is an important supplement to the traditional sleep staging method and has a great value for clinical application.
The peak period of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is around the time of awakening in the morning, which may be related to the surge of sympathetic activity at the end of nocturnal sleep. This paper chose 140 participants as study object, 70 of which had occurred CVD events while the rest hadn’t during a two-year follow-up period. A two-layer model was proposed to investigate whether hypnopompic heart rate variability (HRV) was informative to distinguish these two types of participants. In the proposed model, the extreme gradient boosting algorithm (XGBoost) was used to construct a classifier in the first layer. By evaluating the feature importance of the classifier, those features with larger importance were fed into the second layer to construct the final classifier. Three machine learning algorithms, i.e., XGBoost, random forest and support vector machine were employed and compared in the second layer to find out which one can achieve the highest performance. The results showed that, with the analysis of hypnopompic HRV, the XGBoost+XGBoost model achieved the best performance with an accuracy of 84.3%. Compared with conventional time-domain and frequency-domain features, those features derived from nonlinear dynamic analysis were more important to the model. Especially, modified permutation entropy at scale 1 and sample entropy at scale 3 were relatively important. This study might have significance for the prevention and diagnosis of CVD, as well as for the design of CVD-risk assessment system.
Heart rate variability (HRV) is an important point to judge a person’s state in modern medicine. This paper is aimed to research a person’s fatigue level connected with vagal nerve based on the HRV using the improved Welch method. The process of this method is that it firstly uses a time window function on the signal to be processed, then sets the length of time according to the requirement, and finally makes frequency domain analysis. Compared with classical periodogram method, the variance and consistency of the present method have been improved. We can set time span freely using this method (at present, the time of international standard to measure HRV is 5 minutes). This paper analyses the HRV’s characteristics of fatigue crowd based on the database provided by PhysioNet. We therefore draw the conclusion that the accuracy of Welch analyzing HRV combining with appropriate window function has been improved enormously, and when the person changes to fatigue, the vagal activity is diminished and sympathetic activity is raised.
Calculation of linear parameters, such as time-domain and frequency-domain analysis of heart rate variability (HRV), is a conventional method for assessment of autonomic nervous system activity. Nonlinear phenomena are certainly involved in the genesis of HRV. In a seemingly random signal the Poincaré plot can easily demonstrate whether there is an underlying determinism in the signal. Linear and nonlinear analysis methods were applied in the computer words inputting experiments in this study for physiological measurement. This study therefore demonstrated that Poincaré plot was a simple but powerful graphical tool to describe the dynamics of a system.
Heart rate variability (HRV) is the difference between the successive changes in the heartbeat cycle, and it is produced in the autonomic nervous system modulation of the sinus node of the heart. The HRV is a valuable indicator in predicting the sudden cardiac death and arrhythmic events. Traditional analysis of HRV is based on a multi-electrocardiogram (ECG), but the ECG signal acquisition is complex, so we have designed an HRV analysis system based on photoplethysmography (PPG). PPG signal is collected by a microcontroller from human’s finger, and it is sent to the terminal via USB-Serial module. The terminal software not only collects the data and plot waveforms, but also stores the data for future HRV analysis. The system is small in size, low in power consumption, and easy for operation. It is suitable for daily care no matter whether it is used at home or in a hospital.