Heart rate variability analysis in clinical pharmacology by joint time-frequency methods

We are applying heart rate variability (HRV) analysis in clinical pharmacology to investigate the autonomic nervous system's (ANS) response to drug pharmacodynamics. Here, the HRV time series under investigation are usually nonstationary, thus not suitable for spectral analysis by Fourier- or autoregressive (AR) methods. We designed a PC based system with LabView/sup TM/ for HRV analysis including spectral analysis in the joint time-frequency (JTF) domain that is suitable for nonstationary data. We found a 2nd to 3rd order Gabor spectrogram useful for the analysis of HRV data. We would like to promote JTF analysis of heart rate variability in clinical pharmacology to gain insight into the complex ANS regulation and ANS response to drugs. There is however need for an extension of the current 1996 guidelines for HRV analysis to cover joint time-frequency methods in order to get standardization.