Application of novel mapping for heart rate phase space and its role in cardiac arrhythmia diagnosis

The nonlinear analysis of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is a valuable tool in both clinical practice and physiological research reflecting the ability of the cardiovascular system. Poincare plot is a geometrical representation of RR time series to demonstrate patterns of heart rate dynamics resulting from nonlinear processes. In this paper, by using Poincare plot points we introduced a novel mapping for heart rate phase space in which by analyzing the point´s distribution, we could estimate a two degree polynomial equation in the form of y = Ax²+Bx+C. The useful features obtaining of this map are the coefficients A, B, and C. For evaluating them, we try to distinguish three groups of subjects using the Physionet database (Arrhythmia, Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), and Atrial Fibrillation (AF)) with Normal Sinus Rhythm (NSR). Kruskal-Wallis test was used to define the level of significance of each feature for different groups of subjects to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method in cardiac arrhythmia diagnosis. The results show that these features discriminate CHF from NSR subjects by p<;E-4; arrhythmia from NSR by p<;E-5; and AF from NSR by p<;E-4.