Wavelet leader based multifractal analysis of heart rate variability during myocardial ischaemia.

ROBERTO FABIO LEONARDUZZI; GASTÓN SCHLOTTHAUER; MARÍA EUGENIA TORRES

Congreso; 32nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS; 2010

Heart rate variability is a non invasive and indirectmeasure of the autonomic control of the heart. Therefore, alterationsto this control system caused by myocardial ischaemia arereflected in changes in the complex and irregular fluctuationsof this signal. Multifractal analysis is a well suited tool for theanalysis of this kind of fluctuations, since it gives a descriptionof the singular behavior of a signal. Recently, a new approachfor multifractal analysis was proposed, the wavelet leader basedmultifractal formalism, which shows remarkable improvementsover previous methods. In order to characterize and detectischaemic episodes, in this work we propose to perform ashort-time windowed wavelet leader based multifractal analysis.Our results suggest that this new method provides appropriateindexes that could be used as a tool for the detection ofmyocardial ischaemia.