Renyi Distribution Entropy Analysis of Short-Term Heart Rate Variability Signals and Its Application in Coronary Artery Disease Detection

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a life-threatening condition that, unless treated at an early stage, can lead to congestive heart failure, ischemic heart disease, and myocardial infarction. Early detection of diagnostic features underlying electrocardiography signals is crucial for the identification and treatment of CAD. In the present work, we proposed novel entropy called Renyi Distribution Entropy (RdisEn) for the analysis of short-term heart rate variability (HRV) signals and the detection of CAD. Our simulation experiment with synthetic, physiological, and pathological signals demonstrated that RdisEn could distinguish effectively among different subject groups. Compared to the values of sample entropy or approximation entropy, the RdisEn value was less affected by the parameter choice, and it remained stable even in short-term HRV. We have developed a combined CAD detection scheme with RdisEn and wavelet packet decomposition (WPD): (1) Normal and CAD HRV beats obtained were divided into two equal parts. (2) Feature acquisition: RdisEn and WPD-based statistical features were calculated from one part of HRV beats, and student’s t-test was performed to select clinically significant features. (3) Classification: selected features were computed from the remaining part of HRV beats and fed into K-nearest neighbor and support vector machine, to separate CAD from normal subjects. The proposed scheme automatically detected CAD with 97.5% accuracy, 100% sensitivity and 95% specificity and performed better than most of the existing schemes.