ADAPTIVE FILTER TO AUTOMATIC PREPROCESSING OF
YOUNG ADULTS TACHOGRAMS
Laurita dos Santos, Joaquim J. Barroso, Moacir F. de Godoy
The Heart Rate Variability (HRV), which is quantified by the variation between RR intervals, is dependent on biological modulators such as the activity of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. The presence of ectopic beats and extraneous effects, while perturbing and introducing numerical artifacts into the RR tachogram, interferes with the HRV analysis and, therefore, can lead to erroneous results. To handle this problem and at the same time to facilitate the analysis, the present study proposes an automatic method of data filtering based on an adaptive filter that is able to quickly analyze a large number of tachograms. The method was applied to 62 RR tachograms from normal subjects (healthy). Compared to the costly and time consuming conventional method, wherein the correction of an occasional ectopic beat and removal of aberrant RR intervals are executed by an expert, the proposed method makes use of correlation coefficients (Pearson or Spearman) and the Student’s t unpaired test or the Mann- Whitney test to confirm the reliability of the results. It was found a high correlation between the results, thus ensuring the use of the proposed method.