Background: Heart rate variability (HRV) has been widely used in the non-invasive evaluation of cardiovascular function. Recent studies have also attached great importance to the cardiac diastolic period variability (DPV) examination. Short-term variability measurement (e.g., 5 min) has drawn increasing attention in clinical practice, since it is able to provide almost immediate measurement results and enables the real-time monitoring of cardiovascular function. However, it is still a contemporary challenge to robustly estimate the HRV and DPV parameters based on short-term recordings.
Methods: In this study, a refined fuzzy entropy (rFuzzyEn) was developed by substituting a piecewise fuzzy membership function for the Gaussian function in conventional fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn) measure. Its stability and robustness against additive noise compared with sample entropy (SampEn) and FuzzyEn, were examined by two well-accepted simulation models-the [Formula: see text] noise and the Logistic attractor. The rFuzzyEn was further applied to evaluate clinical short-term (5 min) HRV and DPV of the patients with coronary artery stenosis and healthy volunteers.
Results: Simulation results showed smaller fluctuations in the rFuzzyEn than in SampEn and FuzzyEn values when the data length was decreasing. Besides, rFuzzyEn could distinguish the simulation models with different amount of additive noise even when the percentage of additive noise reached 60%, but neither SampEn nor FuzzyEn showed comparable performance. Clinical HRV analysis did not indicate any significant differences between the patients with coronary artery disease and the healthy volunteers in all the three mentioned entropy measures (all p > 0.20). But clinical DPV analysis showed that the patient group had a significantly higher rFuzzyEn (p < 0.01) than the healthy group. However, no or less significant difference was observed between the two groups in either SampEn (p = 0.14) or FuzzyEn (p = 0.05).
Conclusions: Our proposed rFuzzyEn outperformed conventional SampEn and FuzzyEn in terms of both stability and robustness against additive noise, particularly when the data set was relatively short. Analysis of DPV using rFuzzyEn may provide more valuable information to assess the cardiovascular states than the other entropy measures and has a potential for clinical application.