Analysis of Slope Based Heart Rate Asymmetry using Poincaré Plots

Heart rate asymmetry (HRA) is considered as a physiological phenomenon seen in heart rates of healthy subjects. In this article, we propose a novel heart rate asymmetry index and assess the discriminative power of proposed index in comparison with conventional heart rate asymmetry indices. As an illustrative example we discriminate patients suffering from congestive heart failure (CHF) from a healthy (normal sinus rhythm (NSR) group using HRA of beat-to-beat time series. We evaluate the discriminative power of individual features (p<0.01 is considered statistically significant) and area under Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. These comparisons show that proposed HRA index is superior feature to conventional HRA index for differentiating NSR from CHF subjects.