Improving methodology in heart rate variability analysis for the premature infants: Impact of the time length

Heart rate variability (HRV) has been emerging in neonatal medicine. It may help for the early diagnosis of pathology and estimation of autonomous maturation. There is a lack of standardization and automation in the selection of the sequences to analyze and some features have not been explored in this specific population. The main objective of this study was to analyze the impact of the time length of the sequences on the estimation of linear and non-linear HRV features, including horizontal visibility graphs (HVG).

HRV features were repeatedly measured with linear and non-linear methods on 2-, 5-, 10-minute sequences selected from the longest 15-min sequence and recorded on a weekly basis in 39 infants less than 31 weeks at birth. The associations between HRV measurements were analyzed through principal component analysis and k-means clustering. The effects of the time lengths on HRV measurements and post-menstrual age (PMA) were analyzed by linear mixed effect model for repeated measures.

The domains of analysis were concordant for their descriptive parameters of short (rMSSD, SD1 and HF) and long-term (SD, SD2 and LF) variability. α1 was correlated with the LF/HF and SD2/SD1. DC and AC were correlated with short-term variability estimates and significantly increased with GA and PMA. Shortening the windows of analysis increased the random measurement error for all the features and increased the bias for all but short term features and HVGs.

The linear and non-linear measurements of HRV are correlated each other. Shortening the windows of analysis increased the random error for all the features and increased the bias for all but short term features and HVGs. Short-term HRV can be an index for evaluating the maturation in whatever sequence length.