title: A method for the analysis of respiratory sinus arrhythmia using continuous wavelet transforms.
abstract: A continuous wavelet transform-based method is presented to study the nonstationary strength and phase delay of the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). The RSA is the cyclic variation of instantaneous heart rate at the breathing frequency. In studies of cardio-respiratory interaction during sleep, paced breathing or postural changes, low respiratory frequencies, and fast changes can occur. Comparison on synthetic data presented here shows that the proposed method outperforms traditional short-time Fourier-transform analysis in these conditions. On the one hand, wavelet analysis presents a sufficient frequency-resolution to handle low respiratory frequencies, for which time frames should be long in Fourier-based analysis. On the other hand, it is able to track fast variations of the signals in both amplitude and phase for which time frames should be short in Fourier-based analysis.
authors.affiliation: Faculté des Sciences Appliquées, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: Laurence
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cnockaert
authors.forename: Pierre-François
authors.initials: PF
authors.lastname: Migeotte
authors.forename: Lise
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Daubigny
authors.forename: G Kim
authors.initials: GK
authors.lastname: Prisk
authors.forename: Francis
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Grenez
authors.forename: Rui Carlos
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Sá
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001146:Arrhythmia, Sinus / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D004562:Electrocardiography / Q000379:methods*; D006339:Heart Rate; D006801:Humans; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012129:Respiratory Function Tests / Q000379:methods*; D015656:Respiratory Mechanics; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity