Transfer Entropy Analysis of Pulse Arrival Time - Heart Period Interactions during Physiological Stress

Although Heart Period (HP) variability is the most widely used measure to assess cardiovascular oscillations, its evaluation combined with that of Pulse Arrival Time (PAT) variability may provide additional information about cardiac dynamics and cardiovascular interactions. In this study, we computed the transfer entropy from PAT to HP in 76 subjects monitored at rest and during orthostatic and mental stress using both a model-free (k-Nearest Neighbors) and a linear parametric estimator. Our results show how the information flow between these two variables depends on the physiological condition and how the nonlinear measure captures more information than the linear one during orthostatic stress.