Heart Rate Variability Analysis for Seizure Detection in Neonatal Intensive Care Units

Bioengineering

Benedetta Olmi¹  Antonio Lanat๠ Lorenzo Frassineti¹  Claudia Manfredi¹  Carlo Dani²  Giovanna Bertini²  Cesarina Cossu³  Maria Bastianelli³  Simonetta Gabbanini³  Silvia Lori³ 

[1] Department of Information Engineering, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Via Santa Marta 3, 50139 Firenze, Italy;Department of Neurosciences, Psychology, Drug Research and Child Health, Division of Neonatology, AOU Careggi, Largo Brambilla 3, 50134 Firenze, Italy;Neurophysiology Unit, Neuro-Musculo-Skeletal Department, AOU Careggi University, Largo Brambilla 3, 50134 Firenze, Italy;

关键词: neonatal seizures;    ECG;    HRV;    multiscale entropy;    NICU;   

DOI  :  10.3390/bioengineering9040165

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs), the early detection of neonatal seizures is of utmost importance for a timely clinical intervention. Over the years, several neonatal seizure detection systems were proposed to detect neonatal seizures automatically and speed up seizure diagnosis, most based on the EEG signal analysis. Recently, research has focused on other possible seizure markers, such as electrocardiography (ECG). This work proposes an ECG-based NSD system to investigate the usefulness of heart rate variability (HRV) analysis to detect neonatal seizures in the NICUs. HRV analysis is performed considering time-domain, frequency-domain, entropy and multiscale entropy features. The performance is evaluated on a dataset of ECG signals from 51 full-term babies, 29 seizure-free. The proposed system gives results comparable to those reported in the literature: Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve = 62%, Sensitivity = 47%, Specificity = 67%. Moreover, the system’s performance is evaluated in a real clinical environment, inevitably affected by several artefacts. To the best of our knowledge, our study proposes for the first time a multi-feature ECG-based NSD system that also offers a comparative analysis between babies suffering from seizures and seizure-free ones.

【 授权许可】

Unknown