Chaos-Based Analysis of Heart Rate Variability Time Series in Obstructive Sleep Apnea Subjects

Shiva Naghsh; Mohammad Ataei; Mohammadreza Yazdchi; Mohammad Hashemi

doi:10.4103/jmss.JMSS_23_19

Chaos-Based Analysis of Heart Rate Variability Time Series in Obstructive Sleep Apnea Subjects

J Med Signals Sens. 2020 Feb 6;10(1):53-59. doi: 10.4103/jmss.JMSS_23_19. eCollection 2020 Jan-Mar.

Authors

Shiva Naghsh¹, Mohammad Ataei¹, Mohammadreza Yazdchi², Mohammad Hashemi³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran.
² Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran.
³ Department of Cardiology, School of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.

Abstract

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common disorder which can cause periodic fluctuations in heart rate. To diagnose sleep apnea, some studies analyze electrocardiogram (ECG) signals by adopting chaos-based analysis. This research is going to specifically focus on whether it is possible to use chaos-based analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) signals rather than using chaotic analysis of ECG signals to diagnose OSA. While conventional studies mostly use chaos-based analysis of ECG signals to detect OSA, here, we apply correlation dimension (CD) as a chaotic index to analyze HRV data in OSA patients. For this purpose, 17 patients with OSA and 9 healthy individuals referred to a sleep clinic in Isfahan/Iran are studied, and their HRV time series were extracted from 1-h ECG signals recorded overnight. The preliminary step to calculate CD is phase-space reconstruction of the system based on HRV time series. Corresponding parameters, including embedding dimension and lag time, are estimated optimally using enhanced related methods, and then CD is calculated using Grassberger-Procaccia algorithm. Moreover, to evaluate our results, detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), one of the well-known nonlinear methods in HRV analysis to detect OSA, is also applied to our data and the result is compared with those obtained from CD analysis of HRV. CD index with P < 0.005 indicates a significant difference in nonlinear dynamics of HRV signals detected from OSA patients and healthy individuals.

Keywords: Chaotic indexes; correlation dimension; detrended fluctuation analysis; heart rate variability; obstructive sleep apnea.