Preprocessing Unevenly Sampled RR Interval Signals to Enhance Estimation of Heart Rate Deceleration and Acceleration Capacities in Discriminating Chronic Heart Failure Patients from Healthy Controls

Objective. The deceleration capacity (DC) and acceleration capacity (AC) of heart rate, which are recently proposed variants to the heart rate variability, are calculated from unevenly sampled RR interval signals using phase-rectified signal averaging. Although uneven sampling of these signals compromises heart rate variability analyses, its effect on DC and AC analyses remains to be addressed. Approach. We assess preprocessing (i.e., interpolation and resampling) of RR interval signals on the diagnostic effect of DC and AC from simulation and clinical data. The simulation analysis synthesizes unevenly sampled RR interval signals with known frequency components to evaluate the preprocessing performance for frequency extraction. The clinical analysis compares the conventional DC and AC calculation with the calculation using preprocessed RR interval signals on 24-hour data acquired from normal subjects and chronic heart failure patients. Main Results. The assessment of frequency components in the RR intervals using wavelet analysis becomes more robust with preprocessing. Moreover, preprocessing improves the diagnostic ability based on DC and AC for chronic heart failure patients, with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve increasing from 0.920 to 0.942 for DC and from 0.818 to 0.923 for AC. Significance. Both the simulation and clinical analyses demonstrate that interpolation and resampling of unevenly sampled RR interval signals improve the performance of DC and AC, enabling the discrimination of CHF patients from healthy controls.