Diagnostic of cardio-vascular disease with help of largest Lyapunov exponent of RR-sequences

We suggest to present a discrete sequence of cardiointervals in the form of a smooth lime dependence and for the given time series compute the largest Lyapunov exponent. Processing the database with RR-intervals of patients s uffering from coronary artery disease (CAD) has shown that the largest Lyap unov exponent can be a diagnostic criteria allowing one to distinguish betw een different groups of patients with more confidence than the standard met hods for time series processing accepted in cardiology. (C) 2000 Elsevier S cience Ltd. All rights reserved.