Discrimination between healthy and sick cardiac autonomic nervous system by detrended heart rate variability analysis

Multiresolution Wavelet Transform and Detrended Fluctuation Analysis have r ecently been proven to be excellent methods in the analysis of Heart Rate V ariability and in distinguishing between healthy subjects and patients with various dysfunctions of the cardiac nervous system. We argue that it is po ssible to obtain a distinction between healthy subjects/patients of at leas t similar quality by, first, detrending the time-series of RR-intervals by subtracting a running average based on a local window with a length of arou nd 32 data points, then calculating the standard deviation of the detrended time-series. The results presented here indicate that the analysis can be based on very short time-series of RR-data (7-8 minutes), which is a consid erable improvement relative to 24-hour Holter recordings.