Bispectral analysis of heart rate variability signal

Abstract

This article explores the potential of third-order statis-tics to analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) signal. Bispectral analysis of short-term HRV signals, obtained from a group of of healthy subjects under various exper-imental settings, showed the HRV activity to be located on specific bifrequency regions of the magnitude bispec-trum. Nine strength measures were defined and were found to respond selectively to induced perturbation of sympathetic-vagal control of heart rate. In general the measures contained the spectral information and pro-vided complementary information.