| Title | Revisiting the potential of time-domain indexes in short-term HRV analysis. | ||
| Author | Balocchi, Rita; Cantini, Federico; Varanini, Maurizio; Raimondi, Gianfranco; Legramante, Jacopo M; Macerata, Alberto | ||
| Journal | Biomed Tech (Berl) | Publication Year/Month | 2006-Oct |
| PMID | 17061936 | PMCID | -N/A- |
| Affiliation | 1.Institute of Clinical Physiology, National Research Council, Pisa, Italy. balocchi@ifccnr.it. | ||
In the context of HRV analysis, we evaluated the information content of two measures that can easily be derived from the classical RR time-domain indexes. The two measures are: 1) the ratio sd/rmssd, where sd is the RR standard deviation and rmssd is the root mean square of squared differences of consecutive RR beats; and 2) the ratio sd2/sd1, where sd2 and sd1 are extracted from the Poincare plot and represent the transversal and longitudinal dispersion of the cloud of points (RR(i),RR(i)(+1)). We compared the performance of the two measures with that of the classical LF/HF ratio in a group of healthy subjects who underwent a 70 degrees upright tilt test. The goodness of the results obtained by the two measures, the simplicity of their calculation and their applicability free from a priori assumptions on the characteristics of the data are proposed to the attention of the community involved in the HRV analysis as a possible alternative to the LF/HF ratio.