Poincaré Plot analysis and Graphical User Interface development for the study of Heart Rate Variability in asthmatic children
Milagro, Francisco Javier (2016)
Milagro, Francisco Javier
2016
Master's Degree Programme in Information Technology
Tieto- ja sähkötekniikan tiedekunta - Faculty of Computing and Electrical Engineering
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2016-06-08
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201605254116
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201605254116
Tiivistelmä
Asthma is a chronic lung disease that inflames and narrows the airways, and although it affects people of all ages it most often starts during childhood. However, there is still not a clinical method for the premature diagnosis of asthma, what makes it dependent on the doctor criteria.
Some studies have shown that the pathophysiology of asthma is related with an abnormal ANS function that is responsible of bronchoconstriction. As ANS activity is reflected in HRV, the analysis of this HRV could lead to an interpretation of the physiologic processes underlying asthma, thus serving as a non-invasive way to diagnose it. It is nowadays agree that the several processes involved in HR control interact in a non-linear way and so non-linear analysis of HRV has received high research interest in the last years, so in this work the focus is on Poincaré plot analysis, which is one of the most representative non-linear HRV analysis techniques.
Poincaré plot is a quantitative-visual technique extracted from non-linear dynamics, although the indexes extracted from it have been proven to not provide additional information to that obtained with other methods. Due to this fact, in this work a research in the origins of Poincaré plot has been attempted, in order to define new parameters that can display the non-linear characteristics of the plot. The angle of the plot and the short-term analysis of its shape were proposed, being the objective to find an index that can be used to classify a set of patients aged 3-7 years attending to their risk of suffering from asthma. Furthermore, a GUI was developed so that the information provided by Poincaré plots can be easily compared and integrated with the information extracted from several other indexes.
Although the methods proposed for the extraction of the angle and the shape information were successful, the results obtained in this work showed that the use of both the classical HRV indexes and the new proposed parameters is not enough to stratify the risk of asthma in children. However, the GUI developed was shown to result useful when interpreting Poincaré plot information. Also a qualitative analysis of a Poincaré domain filtering technique proposed in the literature was performed, and several future work lines were established.
Some studies have shown that the pathophysiology of asthma is related with an abnormal ANS function that is responsible of bronchoconstriction. As ANS activity is reflected in HRV, the analysis of this HRV could lead to an interpretation of the physiologic processes underlying asthma, thus serving as a non-invasive way to diagnose it. It is nowadays agree that the several processes involved in HR control interact in a non-linear way and so non-linear analysis of HRV has received high research interest in the last years, so in this work the focus is on Poincaré plot analysis, which is one of the most representative non-linear HRV analysis techniques.
Poincaré plot is a quantitative-visual technique extracted from non-linear dynamics, although the indexes extracted from it have been proven to not provide additional information to that obtained with other methods. Due to this fact, in this work a research in the origins of Poincaré plot has been attempted, in order to define new parameters that can display the non-linear characteristics of the plot. The angle of the plot and the short-term analysis of its shape were proposed, being the objective to find an index that can be used to classify a set of patients aged 3-7 years attending to their risk of suffering from asthma. Furthermore, a GUI was developed so that the information provided by Poincaré plots can be easily compared and integrated with the information extracted from several other indexes.
Although the methods proposed for the extraction of the angle and the shape information were successful, the results obtained in this work showed that the use of both the classical HRV indexes and the new proposed parameters is not enough to stratify the risk of asthma in children. However, the GUI developed was shown to result useful when interpreting Poincaré plot information. Also a qualitative analysis of a Poincaré domain filtering technique proposed in the literature was performed, and several future work lines were established.