Multiscale recurrence analysis of complex physiological rhythmic dynamics

Myocardial infarction (MI), also known as a heart attack, is a leading cause of mortality in the world. Spatial vectorcardiogram (VCG) signals are recorded on the body surface to monitor the underlying cardiac electrical activities in three orthogonal directions of the body, namely, frontal, transverse, and sagittal planes. The 3- dimensional VCG vector loops provide a new way to study the cardiac dynamical behaviors, as opposed to the conventional time delay reconstructed phase space from a single ECG trace. However, few, if any, previous approaches studied the relationships between cardiac disorders and recurrence patterns in VCG signals. This paper presents a novel multiscale recurrence analysis approach for the effective identification of cardiac disorders.