Internationale Zeitschrift für Herz-Kreislauf-Forschung

A Novel Approach to Detect Congestive Heart Failure using Dispersion Entropy

Chandrakar Kamath

A Novel Approach to Detect Congestive Heart Failure using Dispersion Entropy

Background: Congestive heart failure (CHF) being difficult to manage in clinical practice, has been the subject of intensive research.

Methods: A novel chaotic analysis which is a combination of graphical (second-order difference, SOD) plot and numerical (Dispersion entropy, DispEn) method to detect CHF is presented. Instead of central tendency measure which is commonly used together with SOD, DispEn, a quantifier adapted from nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos theory which has some advantages is used. DispEn quantifies degree of complex variability/chaos in a signal over time. This approach permits not only classification of HRV time series, but also assessment of cardiac sympathetic and parasympathetic activities. Hypothesizing that CHF patient will experience an altered cardiac rhythm, with changes in the magnitude of the beat-to-beat HR fluctuations and perturbations in the HR fluctuation dynamics, the HRV of CHF patients is compared with those of healthy subjects using DispEn and two other measures, an entropy related to parasympathetic and sympathetic activities, CDispEn13 and an entropy ratio associated with low-frequency to high-frequency ratio of the variations in the RR intervals, CDispEn13/CDispEn24.