Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Signal Analysis

<p><strong><em>Open a Window into the Autonomic Nervous System</em></strong></p><p>Quantifying the amount of autonomic nervous system activity in an individual patient can be extremely important because it provides a gauge of disease severity in a large number of diseases. Heart rate variability (HRV) calculated from both short-term and longer-term electrocardiograms is an ideal window into such autonomic activity for two reasons: one heart rate is sensitive to autonomic activity in the entire body and two recording electrocardiograms is inexpensive and non-invasive unlike other techniques currently available for autonomic assessment such as microneurography and metaiodobenzylguanidine (MIBG) scanning. <strong>Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Signal Analysis: Clinical Applications</strong> provides a comprehensive review of three major aspects of HRV: mechanism technique and clinical applications. </p><p><strong><em>Learn Techniques for HRV Signal Analysis</em></strong></p><p>Edited by an engineer a cardiologist and a neurologist and featuring contributions by widely published international researchers this interdisciplinary book begins by reviewing the many signal processing techniques developed to extract autonomic activity information embedded in heart-rate records. The classical time and frequency domain measures baroreceptor sensitivity and newer non-linear measures of HRV are described with a fair amount of mathematical detail with the biomedical engineer and mathematically oriented physician in mind. The book also covers two recent HRV methods heart-rate turbulence and phase-rectified signal averaging. </p><p><strong><em>Use of HRV in Clinical Care</em></strong></p><p>The large clinical section is a must-read for clinicians and engineers wishing to get an insight into how HRV is applied in medicine. Nineteen chapters altogether are devoted to uses of HRV in: </p><ul> <li>Monitoring—for example to predict potential complications in pregnancies fetal distress and in neonatal critical care</li> <li>Acute care—for gauging the depth of anesthesia during surgery and predicting change in patient status in the intensive care unit</li> <li>Chronic disorders—for assessing the severity of congestive heart failure stroke Parkinson’s disease and depression</li> </ul><p>Bringing together the latest research this comprehensive reference demonstrates the utility and potential of HRV signal analysis in both the clinic and physiology laboratory. </p>