title: Delay-correlation landscape reveals characteristic time delays of brain rhythms and heart interactions.
abstract: Within the framework of 'Network Physiology', we ask a fundamental question of how modulations in cardiac dynamics emerge from networked brain-heart interactions. We propose a generalized time-delay approach to identify and quantify dynamical interactions between physiologically relevant brain rhythms and the heart rate. We perform empirical analysis of synchronized continuous EEG and ECG recordings from 34 healthy subjects during night-time sleep. For each pair of brain rhythm and heart interaction, we construct a delay-correlation landscape (DCL) that characterizes how individual brain rhythms are coupled to the heart rate, and how modulations in brain and cardiac dynamics are coordinated in time. We uncover characteristic time delays and an ensemble of specific profiles for the probability distribution of time delays that underly brain-heart interactions. These profiles are consistently observed in all subjects, indicating a universal pattern. Tracking the evolution of DCL across different sleep stages, we find that the ensemble of time-delay profiles changes from one physiologic state to another, indicating a strong association with physiologic state and function. The reported observations provide new insights on neurophysiological regulation of cardiac dynamics, with potential for broad clinical applications. The presented approach allows one to simultaneously capture key elements of dynamic interactions, including characteristic time delays and their time evolution, and can be applied to a range of coupled dynamical systems.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, School of Science, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, People's Republic of China Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology, Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA.
authors.forename: Aijing
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology, Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA Department of Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02215, USA.
authors.forename: Kang K L
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 5290002, Israel.
authors.forename: Ronny P
authors.initials: RP
authors.lastname: Bartsch
authors.affiliation: Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology, Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA Institute of Solid State Physics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, 1784, Bulgaria plamen@buphy.bu.edu.
authors.forename: Plamen Ch
authors.initials: PCh
authors.lastname: Ivanov
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Network Physiology; brain–heart interactions; delay-correlation landscape; time-delay analysis