4,085 research outputs found
The Earth as a living planet: human-type diseases in the earthquake preparation process
The new field of complex systems supports the view that a number of systems
arising from disciplines as diverse as physics, biology, engineering, and
economics may have certain quantitative features that are intriguingly similar.
The earth is a living planet where many complex systems run perfectly without
stopping at all. The earthquake generation is a fundamental sign that the earth
is a living planet. Recently, analyses have shown that human-brain-type disease
appears during the earthquake generation process. Herein, we show that
human-heart-type disease appears during the earthquake preparation of the
earthquake process. The investigation is mainly attempted by means of critical
phenomena, which have been proposed as the likely paradigm to explain the
origins of both heart electric fluctuations and fracture induced
electromagnetic fluctuations. We show that a time window of the damage
evolution within the heterogeneous Earth's crust and the healthy heart's
electrical action present the characteristic features of the critical point of
a thermal second order phase transition. A dramatic breakdown of critical
characteristics appears in the tail of the fracture process of heterogeneous
system and the injury heart's electrical action. Analyses by means of Hurst
exponent and wavelet decomposition further support the hypothesis that a
dynamical analogy exists between the geological and biological systems under
study
Leave-one-out prediction error of systolic arterial pressure time series under paced breathing
In this paper we show that different physiological states and pathological
conditions may be characterized in terms of predictability of time series
signals from the underlying biological system. In particular we consider
systolic arterial pressure time series from healthy subjects and Chronic Heart
Failure patients, undergoing paced respiration. We model time series by the
regularized least squares approach and quantify predictability by the
leave-one-out error. We find that the entrainment mechanism connected to paced
breath, that renders the arterial blood pressure signal more regular, thus more
predictable, is less effective in patients, and this effect correlates with the
seriousness of the heart failure. The leave-one-out error separates controls
from patients and, when all orders of nonlinearity are taken into account,
alive patients from patients for which cardiac death occurred
Complexity Variability Assessment of Nonlinear Time-Varying Cardiovascular Control
The application of complex systems theory to physiology and medicine has provided meaningful information about the nonlinear aspects underlying the dynamics of a wide range of biological processes and their disease-related aberrations. However, no studies have investigated whether meaningful information can be extracted by quantifying second-order moments of time-varying cardiovascular complexity. To this extent, we introduce a novel mathematical framework termed complexity variability, in which the variance of instantaneous Lyapunov spectra estimated over time serves as a reference quantifier. We apply the proposed methodology to four exemplary studies involving disorders which stem from cardiology, neurology and psychiatry: Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), Major Depression Disorder (MDD), Parkinson?s Disease (PD), and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) patients with insomnia under a yoga training regime. We show that complexity assessments derived from simple time-averaging are not able to discern pathology-related changes in autonomic control, and we demonstrate that between-group differences in measures of complexity variability are consistent across pathologies. Pathological states such as CHF, MDD, and PD are associated with an increased complexity variability when compared to healthy controls, whereas wellbeing derived from yoga in PTSD is associated with lower time-variance of complexity
Nonlinear trend removal should be carefully performed in heart rate variability analysis
Background : In Heart rate variability analysis, the rate-rate time
series suffer often from aperiodic non-stationarity, presence of ectopic beats
etc. It would be hard to extract helpful information from the original signals.
10 Problem : Trend removal methods are commonly practiced to reduce
the influence of the low frequency and aperiodic non-stationary in RR data.
This can unfortunately affect the signal and make the analysis on detrended
data less appropriate. Objective : Investigate the detrending effect
(linear \& nonlinear) in temporal / nonliear analysis of heart rate variability
of long-term RR data (in normal sinus rhythm, atrial fibrillation, 15
congestive heart failure and ventricular premature arrhythmia conditions).
Methods : Temporal method : standard measure SDNN; Nonlinear methods
: multi-scale Fractal Dimension (FD), Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) \&
Sample Entropy (Sam-pEn) analysis. Results : The linear detrending
affects little the global characteristics of the RR data, either 20 in temporal
analysis or in nonlinear complexity analysis. After linear detrending, the
SDNNs are just slightly shifted and all distributions are well preserved. The
cross-scale complexity remained almost the same as the ones for original RR
data or correlated. Nonlinear detrending changed not only the SDNNs
distribution, but also the order among different types of RR data. After this
processing, the SDNN became indistinguishable be-25 tween SDNN for normal sinus
rhythm and ventricular premature beats. Different RR data has different
complexity signature. Nonlinear detrending made the all RR data to be similar ,
in terms of complexity. It is thus impossible to distinguish them. The FD
showed that nonlinearly detrended RR data has a dimension close to 2, the
exponent from DFA is close to zero and SampEn is larger than 1.5 -- these
complexity values are very close to those for 30 random signal.
Conclusions : Pre-processing by linear detrending can be performed on RR data,
which has little influence on the corresponding analysis. Nonlinear detrending
could be harmful and it is not advisable to use this type of pre-processing.
Exceptions do exist, but only combined with other appropriate techniques to
avoid complete change of the signal's intrinsic dynamics. 35 Keywords
heart rate variability linear / nonlinear detrending
complexity analysis mul-tiscale analysis detrended
fluctuation analysis fractal dimension sample entropy
Estimation of instantaneous complex dynamics through Lyapunov exponents: a study on heartbeat dynamics
Measures of nonlinearity and complexity, and in particular the study of Lyapunov exponents, have been increasingly used to characterize dynamical properties of a wide range of biological nonlinear systems, including cardiovascular control. In this work, we present a novel methodology able to effectively estimate the Lyapunov spectrum of a series of stochastic events in an instantaneous fashion. The paradigm relies on a novel point-process high-order nonlinear model of the event series dynamics. The long-term information is taken into account by expanding the linear, quadratic, and cubic Wiener-Volterra kernels with the orthonormal Laguerre basis functions. Applications to synthetic data such as the H�non map and R�ssler attractor, as well as two experimental heartbeat interval datasets (i.e., healthy subjects undergoing postural changes and patients with severe cardiac heart failure), focus on estimation and tracking of the Instantaneous Dominant Lyapunov Exponent (IDLE). The novel cardiovascular assessment demonstrates that our method is able to effectively and instantaneously track the nonlinear autonomic control dynamics, allowing for complexity variability estimations
Inhomogeneous point-process entropy: an instantaneous measure of complexity in discrete systems
Measures of entropy have been widely used to characterize complexity, particularly in physiological dynamical systems modeled in discrete time. Current approaches associate these measures to finite single values within an observation window, thus not being able to characterize the system evolution at each moment in time. Here, we propose a new definition of approximate and sample entropy based on the inhomogeneous point-process theory. The discrete time series is modeled through probability density functions, which characterize and predict the time until the next event occurs as a function of the past history. Laguerre expansions of the Wiener-Volterra autoregressive terms account for the long-term nonlinear information. As the proposed measures of entropy are instantaneously defined through probability functions, the novel indices are able to provide instantaneous tracking of the system complexity. The new measures are tested on synthetic data, as well as on real data gathered from heartbeat dynamics of healthy subjects and patients with cardiac heart failure and gait recordings from short walks of young and elderly subjects. Results show that instantaneous complexity is able to effectively track the system dynamics and is not affected by statistical noise properties
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