Scale-independent measures and pathologic cardiac dynamics

We study several scale-independent measures of cardiac interbeat interval dynamics defined through the application of the wavelet transform. We test their performance in detecting heart disease using a database consisting of records of interbeat intervals for a group of healthy individuals and subjects with congestive heart failure. We find that scale-independent measures effectively distinguish healthy from pathologic behavior and propose a new two-variable scale-independent measure that could be clinically useful. We compare the performance of a recently proposed scale-dependent measure and find that the results depend on the database analyzed and on the analyzing wavelet.