title: Clustering of ventricular arrhythmic complexes in heart rhythm.
abstract: We study the statistics of intervals τ between ventricular premature complexes (VPCs) in 24-h electrocardiogram records obtained from PhysioNet data source. We find that the long-term memory inherent in the heartbeat intervals leads to power laws in the probability density function P(τ) between VPCs for τ>6 s. As a consequence, the probability W(t,Δt) that at least one VPC will occur within the next time interval Δt, if the last VPC occurred t time units intervals ago, decays by a power law of t. Based on these results, we suggest a method to obtain a priori information about the occurrence of the next VPC, and how to predict it. We think that usage of this a priori information could be useful for the improvement of the algorithms in healthcare monitoring devices with alarm facilities.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, D-35392 Giessen, Germany.
authors.forename: Anastasia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sokolova
authors.forename: Mikhail I
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Bogachev
authors.forename: Armin
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bunde
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006339:Heart Rate; D006801:Humans; D008955:Models, Cardiovascular; D015233:Models, Statistical; D018879:Ventricular Premature Complexes / Q000503:physiopathology*