A systematic approach to local stability analysis of cardiovascular baroreflex

This paper presents a novel systematic approach to the stability analysis of the cardiovascular (CV) baroreflex. The proposed approach determines the equilibrium state and the system stability in its neighbourhood with computational efficiency, once the parameters of the CV baroreflex model are specified for an individual. We first propose a linearization-based analytical method for determining the equilibrium state of the CV baroreflex. We then present a Lyapunov-based systematic approach to analyze the system stability in the neighbourhood of the equilibrium state. The results of simulation experiments suggest that the performance of the proposed approach is encouraging: it was able to accurately determine the equilibrium state and quantify the stability of the CV baroreflex. The proposed approach is also powerful in exploring the relationship between the CV baroreflex stability and its parameter configurations.