Symbolic features and classification via support vector machine for predicting death in patients with Chagas disease.

This paper introduces a technique for predicting death in patients with Chagas disease using features extracted from symbolic series and time-frequency indices of heart rate variability (HRV). The study included 150 patients: 15 patients who died and 135 who did not. The HRV series were obtained from 24-h Holter monitoring. Sequences of symbols from 5-min epochs from series of RR intervals were generated using symbolic dynamics and ordinal pattern statistics. Fourteen features were extracted from symbolic series and four derived from clinical aspects of patients. For classification, the 18 features from each epoch were used as inputs in a support vector machine (SVM) with a radial basis function (RBF) kernel. The results showed that it is possible to distinguish between the two classes, patients with Chagas disease who did or did not die, with a 95% accuracy rate. Therefore, we suggest that the use of new features based on symbolic series, coupled with classic time-frequency and clinical indices, proves to be a good predictor of death in patients with Chagas disease.

Automatic sleep staging from ventilator signals in non-invasive ventilation.

Non-invasive ventilation (NIV), a recognized treatment for chronic hypercapnic respiratory failure, is predominantly applied at night. Nevertheless, the quality of sleep is rarely evaluated due to the required technological complexity. A new technique for automatic sleep staging is here proposed for patients treated by NIV. This new technique only requires signals (airflow and hemoglobin oxygen saturation) available in domiciliary ventilators plus a photo-plethysmogram, a signal already managed by some ventilators. Consequently, electroencephalogram, electrooculogram, electromyogram, and electrocardiogram recordings are not needed. Cardiorespiratory features are extracted from the three selected signals and used as input to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) multi-class classifier. Two different types of sleep scoring were investigated: the first type was used to distinguish three stages (wake, REM sleep and nonREM sleep), and the second type was used to evaluate five stages (wake, REM sleep, N1, N2 and N3 stages). Patient-dependent and patient-independent classifiers were tested comparing the resulting hypnograms with those obtained from visual/manual scoring by a sleep specialist. An average accuracy of 91% (84%) was obtained with three-stage (five-stage) patient-dependent classifiers. With patient-independent classifiers, an average accuracy of 78% (62%) was obtained when three (five) sleep stages were scored. Also if the PPG-based and flow features are left out, a reduction of 4.5% (resp. 5%) in accuracy is observed for the three-stage (resp. five-stage) cases. Our results suggest that long-term sleep evaluation and nocturnal monitoring at home is feasible in patients treated by NIV. Our technique could even be integrated into ventilators.