Evidence Consistent with Deterministic Chaos in Human Cardiac Data: Surrogate and Nonlinear Dynamical Modeling

Whether or not the human cardiac system is chaotic has long been a subject of interest in the application of nonlinear time series analysis. The surrogate data method, which identifies an observed time series against three common kinds of hypotheses, does not provide sufficient evidence to confirm the existence of deterministic chaotic dynamics in cardiac time series, such as electrocardiogram data and pulse pressure propagation data. Moreover, these methods fail to exclude all but the most trivial hypothesis of linear noise. We present a recently suggested fourth algorithm for testing the hypotheses of a noise driven periodic orbit to decide whether these signals are consistent with deterministic chaos. Of course, we cannot exclude all other alternatives but our test is certainly stronger than the those applied previously. The algorithmic complexity is used as the discriminating statistic of the surrogate data method. We then perform nonlinear modeling for the short-term prediction between ECG and pulse data to provide further evidence that they conform to deterministic processes. We demonstrate the application of these methods to human electrocardiogram recordings and blood pressure propagation in the fingertip of seven healthy subjects. Our results indicate that bounded aperiodic determinism exists in both ECG and pulse time series. The addition of (the inevitable) dynamic noise means that it is not possible to conclude the underlying system is chaotic.

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