An expert system to identify different classes of diabetic cardiac autonomic neuropathy (DCAN)

Diabetic Cardiac Autonomic Neuropathy (DCAN) has been found to be a precursor for Sudden Cardiac Death and several other serious heart diseases. The changes which occur in the frequency domain parameters of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) signal, extracted during the normal, relaxed state and during the deep breathing state are found to be excellent indicators of the neuropathic conditions of the heart. In the present work, an expert system has been developed to classify the type of neuropathy in each subject, based on the values of the frequency domain parameters calculated using the signal processing algorithms on the HRV signal. In this rule based expert system, six different classes are identified, namely normal, parasympathetic loss, sympathetic loss, mixed loss, neural imbalance and late parasympathetic action.