Application of Dispersion Entropy to Healthy and Pathological Heartbeat ECG Segments

Entropy quantification algorithms are a prominent tool for the quantification of irregularity in biological signal segments towards the characterization of the physiological state of individuals. This paper investigates the potential of Dispersion Entropy (DisEn) as a non-linear method to quantify the uncertainty of ECG signal segments for different types of heartbeats and the stratification of healthy heartbeats for the potential detection of developing pathologies in individuals. Our results indicate that the DisEn algorithm produces distributions with significant differences for the considered types of heartbeats, with higher DisEn values being more prominent in pathological heartbeats and normal heartbeats preceding them. This suggests that, with further research, DisEn algorithms can be integrated with heartbeat detection and classification algorithms for the improvement of medical prognosis through ECG signal processing.