Disentanglement of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity by instantaneous analysis of human heartbeat dynamics

Spectral analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) is one of the most effective techniques for the assessment of the influence of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) on the heartbeat. Despite its widespread use, it has been demonstrated that HRV subdivision in the low frequency (LF) and high frequency (HF) bands does not accurately reflect separate sympathetic and parasympathetic influences, respectively, mainly due to overlap of the two branches in the low frequencies. Here we propose two novel indices, namely the instantaneous sympathetic autonomic index (SAI) and parasympathetic autonomic index (PAI), that are able to separately assess the time-varying ANS synergic functions. The application of the paradigm is presented here by associating proper combinations of orthonormal Laguerre functions defined within the heartbeat point-process continuous model. Preliminary results from ten subjects recorded during a tilt-table protocol show that the proposed methodology, differently than the traditional spectral parameters, is able to separately track the independent changes associated with the two ANS branches.