DISCRIMINATION OF THE HEALTHY AND SICK CARDIAC AUTONOMIC NERVOUS-SYSTEM BY A NEW WAVELET ANALYSIS OF HEARTBEAT INTERVALS

We demonstrate that it is possible to distinguish with a complete cert ainty between healthy subjects and patients with various dysfunctions of the cardiac nervous system by way of multiresolutional wavelet tran sform of RR intervals. We repeated the study of Thurner et al. on diff erent ensemble of subjects. We show that reconstructed series using a filter which discards wavelet coefficients related with higher scales enables one to classify individuals for which the method otherwise is inconclusive. We suggest a delimiting diagnostic value of the standard deviation of the filtered, reconstructed RR interval time series in t he range of similar to 0.035 (for the above mentioned filter), below w hich individuals are at risk.