Spectral analysis of HRV by means of time frequency distributions: application to ischemia analysis

The analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) is currently used as a means for non invasively researching the autonomous control of the cardiovascular system. In this analysis it is very important to have a good temporal resolution as the phenomena analyzed may present a very short duration. We show the advantage of the use of time frequency distributions (TFD) with respect to the classical spectrogram. We show that given the characteristics of the HRV signal, it is advisable to use adaptive kernels in order to improve the temporal resolution. Finally, we comment on the results obtained applying this technique to the analysis of ischemic episodes.