Multifractality in Human Heartbeat Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper investigates multifractality in healthy human heartbeat dynamics, revealing complex scaling properties and phase encoding, and shows a loss of these features in heart failure conditions.

Contribution

It provides evidence of multifractality in healthy heart rate variability and links it to phase information, highlighting its degradation in heart failure.

Findings

Healthy heartbeats exhibit multifractal scaling.

Multifractality is encoded in Fourier phases.

Loss of multifractality correlates with heart failure.

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that physiological signals under healthy conditions may have a fractal temporal structure. We investigate the possibility that time series generated by certain physiological control systems may be members of a special class of complex processes, termed multifractal, which require a large number of exponents to characterize their scaling properties. We report on evidence for multifractality in a biological dynamical system --- the healthy human heartbeat. Further, we show that the multifractal character and nonlinear properties of the healthy heart rate are encoded in the Fourier phases. We uncover a loss of multifractality for a life-threatening condition, congestive heart failure.