Transient behavior of cardiorespiratory interactions towards the onset of epileptic seizures
Epileptic seizures are typically related to autonomic dysfunction. During seizures, the cardiac and respiratory mechanisms are deeply affected. This effect of epilepsy can also occur a few seconds before the seizure onset in the EEG. In addition, the interaction between respiration and heart rate is also expected to be affected. This study aims to determine whether the cardiorespiratory interactions change during seizures, and more importantly if they show a transient behavior towards the seizure onset. This is done by means of a time series method based on entropy decomposition applied to ECG and respiratory data. Here, the information carried by the heart rate that can be predicted by its…
Model-Based Evaluation of Methods for Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia Estimation
OBJECTIVE: Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) refers to heart rate oscillations synchronous with respiration, and it is one of the major representations of cardiorespiratory coupling. Its strength has been suggested as a biomarker to monitor different conditions, and diseases. Some approaches have been proposed to quantify the RSA, but it is unclear which one performs best in specific scenarios. The main objective of this study is to compare seven state-of-the-art methods for RSA quantification using data generated with a model proposed to simulate, and control the RSA. These methods are also compared, and evaluated on a real-life application, for their ability to capture changes in cardior…
Information Transfer Between Respiration and Heart Rate During Sleep Apnea
It is well-known that sleep apnea affects the respiration and the heart rate (HR), and studies have shown that the cardiorespiratory coupling is also compromised during obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Furthermore, the classification of hypopneas is challenging, in particular when only ECG-derived features are used. In this context, this study investigates how different ECG-derived respiratory (EDR) signals resemble the respiratory effort during different types of apneas, and how the amount of information transferred from respiration to HR varies according to the respiratory signal used, real or ECG-derived. ECG and respiratory signals of 10 patients suffering from sleep apnea were analysed, …
Separating respiratory influences from the tachogram: Methods and their sensitivity to the type of respiratory signal
Respiration is one of the main modulators causing heart rate variability (HRV). However, when interpreting studies of HRV, the effect of respiration is largely ignored. We, therefore, previously proposed to take respiratory influences into account by separating the tachogram in a component that is related to respiration and one that contains all residual variations. In this study, we aim to investigate the sensitivity of two of such separation methods, i.e. one based on an ARMAX model and another one based on orthogonal subspace projection (OSP), towards different respiratory signal types, such as nasal airflow (the reference), thoracic and abdominal efforts, and three ECG-derived respirato…
Interictal cardiorespiratory variability in temporal lobe and absence epilepsy in childhood
It is well known that epilepsy has a profound effect on the autonomic nervous system, especially on the autonomic control of heart rate and respiration. This effect has been widely studied during seizure activity, but less attention has been given to interictal (i.e. seizure-free) activity. The studies that have been done on this topic, showed that heart rate and respiration can be affected individually, even without the occurrence of seizures. In this work, the interactions between these two individual physiological variables are analysed during interictal activity in temporal lobe and absence epilepsy in childhood. These interactions are assessed by decomposing the predictive information …