Abstract
To investigate the relationship between local blood flux and heart rate variability following different thermal stimulations, healthy subjects were recruited and subject to different thermal stimulations on the right forearm. Multiscale entropy and multiscale fuzzy entropy were used to measure the complexity of the local blood flux, and the approximate entropy was calculated to evaluate the HRV complexity. The results indicated that thermal stimulation significantly increased local blood flux and that different temperature stimulations resulted in different complexities in local blood flux. A 42 °C or 44 °C thermal stimulation, other than stimulations below 42 °C, resulted in a moderate correlation between local blood flux and heart rate variability complexity. The results provide a new perspective in terms of complexity to explore the relationship between skin blood flux signals and cardiac function.
Highlights
To investigate the relationship between local blood flux and heart rate variability following different thermal stimulations, healthy subjects were recruited and subject to different thermal stimulations on the right forearm
Approximate Entropy (ApEn) could be used to differentiate healthy subjects from patients with coronary artery disease[14], and as a case, it can be used to measure the complexity of HRV15
Many studies have indicated that nonlinear dynamic analysis could be a candidate method to study skin blood perfusion (SkBF) response activity[18], and sample entropy (SE) has been used both to discriminate different microcirculatory responses in stroke patients[19] and evaluate the SkBF response resulting from thermal stresses[20]
Summary
To investigate the relationship between local blood flux and heart rate variability following different thermal stimulations, healthy subjects were recruited and subject to different thermal stimulations on the right forearm. A 42 °C or 44 °C thermal stimulation, other than stimulations below 42 °C, resulted in a moderate correlation between local blood flux and heart rate variability complexity. No matter how complex the cascade reaction following thermal stimulation, local blood flux is among the most direct non-invasive indicators to investigate the effect mechanism, and a previous study has shown that local temperature is an essential factor regulating skin blood flux[4]. Studies have indicated that nonlinear analysis of heart dynamics may provide more powerful information than time- or frequency-domain results of heart rate variability[13]. Many studies have indicated that nonlinear dynamic analysis could be a candidate method to study SkBF response activity[18], and sample entropy (SE) has been used both to discriminate different microcirculatory responses in stroke patients[19] and evaluate the SkBF response resulting from thermal stresses[20]. The relationship between the complexity of the local blood flux signal and HRV was analysed
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