Feasibility study for the assessment of cardio-respiratory coupling in newborn infants

Cardio Respiratory Coupling (CRC) plays a key role during infant development. Nonetheless, mechanisms underlying it are still mostly unexplained and tools to assess it are often inadequate to understand its functioning. This study aims to evaluate the feasibility of CRC activity detection and quantification analyzing ECG and respiration of newborn healthy subjects. Cross-spectral analysis (coherence) and a novel application of a nonlinear method (Bivariate Phase Rectified Signal Averaging) were applied on 10 minutes recording from 4 subjects. Our preliminary results show that these methods can provide significant information about the occurrence and the strength of CRC, opening interesting perspectives in the evaluation of cardiorespiratory pathologies in newborn infants. In particular, the observed dynamic behavior appears stable and centered around one single frequency in Quiet Sleep, while being more variable and less consistent in Active Sleep.