Leandro. (2015) Acute mental stress assessment via short term HRV analysis in healthy adults : a systematic review with meta-analysis. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, Volume 18 . pp. 370-377. Permanent WRAP url:http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/69425 Copyright and reuse:The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-forprofit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP url' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: publications@warwick.ac.uk Acute mental stress assessment via short term HRV analysis in healthy adults: a systematic review with meta-analysis. AbstractMental stress reduces performances, on the work place and in daily life, and is one of the first causes of cognitive dysfunctions, cardiovascular disorders and depression. This study systematically reviewed existing literature investigating, in healthy subjects, the associations between acute mental stress and short-term Heart Rate Variability (HRV) measures in time, frequency and non-linear domain. The goal of this study was to provide reliable information about the trends and the pivot values of HRV measures during mental stress. A systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence was conducted, performing an exhaustive research of electronic repositories and linear researching references of papers responding to the inclusion criteria. After removing duplicates and not pertinent papers, journal papers describing well-designed studies that analyzed rigorously HRV were included if analyzed the same population of healthy subjects at rest and during mental stress. 12 papers were shortlisted, enrolling overall 758 volunteers and investigating 22 different HRV measures, 9 of which reported by at least 2 studies and therefore meta-analyzed in this review. Four measures in time and nonlinear domains, associated with a normal degree of HRV variations resulted significantly depressed during stress. The power of HRV fluctuations at high frequencies was significantly depressed during stress, while the ratio between low and high frequency resulted significantly increased, suggest...

BackgroundThis paper suggests a method to assess the extent to which ultra-short Heart Rate Variability (HRV) features (less than 5 min) can be considered as valid surrogates of short HRV features (nominally 5 min). Short term HRV analysis has been widely investigated for mental stress assessment, whereas the validity of ultra-short HRV features remains unclear. Therefore, this study proposes a method to explore the extent to which HRV excerpts can be shortened without losing their ability to automatically detect mental stress.MethodsECGs were acquired from 42 healthy subjects during a university examination and resting condition. 23 features were extracted from HRV excerpts of different lengths (i.e., 30 s, 1 min, 2 min, 3 min, and 5 min). Significant differences between rest and stress phases were investigated using non-parametric statistical tests at different time-scales. Features extracted from each ultra-short length were compared with the standard short HRV features, assumed as the benchmark, via Spearman’s rank correlation analysis and Bland-Altman plots during rest and stress phases. Using data-driven machine learning approaches, a model aiming to detect mental stress was trained, validated and tested using short HRV features, and assessed on the ultra-short HRV features.ResultsSix out of 23 ultra-short HRV features (MeanNN, StdNN, MeanHR, StdHR, HF, and SD2) displayed consistency across all of the excerpt lengths (i.e., from 5 to 1 min) and 3 out of those 6 ultra-short HRV features (MeanNN, StdHR, and HF) achieved good performance (accuracy above 88%) when employed in a well-dimensioned automatic classifier.ConclusionThis study concluded that 6 ultra-short HRV features are valid surrogates of short HRV features for mental stress investigation.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12911-019-0742-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Wearable inertial sensors have been widely investigated for fall risk assessment and prediction in older adults. However, heterogeneity in published studies in terms of sensor location, task assessed and features extracted is high, making challenging evidence-based design of new studies and/or real-life applications. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to appraise the best available evidence in the field. Namely, we applied established statistical methods for the analysis of categorical data to identify optimal combinations of sensor locations, tasks, and feature categories. We also conducted a meta-analysis on sensor-based features to identify a set of significant features and their pivot values. The results demonstrated that with a walking test, the most effective feature to assess the risk of falling was the velocity with the sensor placed on the shins. Conversely, during quite standing, linear acceleration measured at the lower back was the most effective combination of feature-placement. Similarly, during the sit-to-stand and/or the stand-to-sit tests, linear acceleration measured at the lower back seems to be the most effective feature-placement combination. The meta-analysis demonstrated that four features resulted significantly higher in fallers: the root-mean-square acceleration in the mediolateral direction during quiet standing with eyes closed [Mean Difference (MD): 0.01 g; 95% Confidence Interval (CI95%): 0.006 to 0.014]; the number of steps (MD: 1.638 steps; CI95%: 0.384 to 2.892) and total time (MD: 2.274 seconds; CI95%: 0.531 to 4.017) to complete the timed up and go test; and the step time (MD: 0.053; CI95%: 0.012 to 0.095; p = 0.01) during walking.

Ultra-short heart rate variability (HRV) analysis refers to the study of HRV features in excerpts of length <5 min. Ultra-short HRV is widely growing in many healthcare applications for monitoring individual's health and well-being status, especially in combination with wearable sensors, mobile phones, and smart-watches. Long-term (nominally 24 h) and short-term (nominally 5 min) HRV features have been widely investigated, physiologically justified and clear guidelines for analysing HRV in 5 min or 24 h are available. Conversely, the reliability of ultra-short HRV features remains unclear and many investigations have adopted ultra-short HRV analysis without questioning its validity. This is partially due to the lack of accepted algorithms guiding investigators to systematically assess ultra-short HRV reliability. This Letter critically reviewed the existing literature, aiming to identify the most suitable algorithms, and harmonise them to suggest a standard protocol that scholars may use as a reference in future studies. The results of the literature review were surprising, because, among the 29 reviewed papers, only one paper used a rigorous method, whereas the others employed methods that were partially or completely unreliable due to the incorrect use of statistical tests. This Letter provides recommendations on how to assess ultra-short HRV features reliably and proposes an inclusive algorithm that summarises the state-of-the-art knowledge in this area.

BackgroundApproximate entropy (ApEn) and sample entropy (SampEn) have been previously used to quantify the regularity in centre of pressure (COP) time-series in different experimental groups and/or conditions. ApEn and SampEn are very sensitive to their input parameters: m (subseries length), r (tolerance) and N (data length). Yet, the effects of changing those parameters have been scarcely investigated in the analysis of COP time-series. This study aimed to investigate the effects of changing parameters m, r and N on ApEn and SampEn values in COP time-series, as well as the ability of these entropy measures to discriminate between groups.MethodsA public dataset of COP time-series was used. ApEn and SampEn were calculated for m = {2, 3, 4, 5}, r = {0.1, 0.15, 0.2, 0.25, 0.3, 0.35, 0.4, 0.45, 0.5} and N = {600, 1200} (30 and 60 s, respectively). Subjects were stratified in young adults (age < 60, n = 85), and older adults (age ≥ 60) with (n = 18) and without (n = 56) falls in the last year. The effects of changing parameters m, r and N on ApEn and SampEn were investigated with a three-way ANOVA. The ability of ApEn and SampEn to discriminate between groups was investigated with a mixed ANOVA (within-subject factors: m, r and N; between-subject factor: group). Specific combinations of m, r and N producing significant differences between groups were identified using the Tukey’s honest significant difference procedure.ResultsA significant three-way interaction between m, r and N confirmed the sensitivity of ApEn and SampEn to the input parameters. SampEn showed a higher consistency and ability to discriminate between groups than ApEn. Significant differences between groups were mostly observed in longer (N = 1200) COP time-series in the anterior-posterior direction. Those differences were observed for specific combinations of m and r, highlighting the importance of an adequate selection of input parameters.ConclusionsFuture studies should favour SampEn over ApEn and longer time-series (≥ 60 s) over shorter ones (e.g. 30 s). The use of parameter combinations such as SampEn (m = {4, 5}, r = {0.25, 0.3, 0.35}) is recommended.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12984-018-0465-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Mental stress may cause cognitive dysfunctions, cardiovascular disorders and depression. Mental stress detection via short-term Heart Rate Variability (HRV) analysis has been widely explored in the last years, while ultra-short term (less than 5 minutes) HRV has been not. This study aims to detect mental stress using linear and non-linear HRV features extracted from 3 minutes ECG excerpts recorded from 42 university students, during oral examination (stress) and at rest after a vacation. HRV features were then extracted and analyzed according to the literature using validated software tools. Statistical and data mining analysis were then performed on the extracted HRV features. The best performing machine learning method was the C4.5 tree algorithm, which discriminated between stress and rest with sensitivity, specificity and accuracy rate of 78%, 80% and 79% respectively.

In breast cancer studies, combining quantitative radiomic with genomic signatures can help identifying and characterizing radiogenomic phenotypes, in function of molecular receptor status. Biomedical imaging processing lacks standards in radiomic feature normalization methods and neglecting feature normalization can highly bias the overall analysis. This study evaluates the effect of several normalization techniques to predict four clinical phenotypes such as estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), and triple negative (TN) status, by quantitative features. The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) radiomic features from 91 T1-weighted Dynamic Contrast Enhancement MRI of invasive breast cancers were investigated in association with breast invasive carcinoma miRNA expression profiling from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Three advanced machine learning techniques (Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Naïve Bayesian) were investigated to distinguish between molecular prognostic indicators and achieved an area under the ROC curve (AUC) values of 86%, 93%, 91%, and 91% for the prediction of ER+ versus ER−, PR+ versus PR−, HER2+ versus HER2−, and triple-negative, respectively. In conclusion, radiomic features enable to discriminate major breast cancer molecular subtypes and may yield a potential imaging biomarker for advancing precision medicine.

Acute sleep deprivation is known to affect human balance and posture control. However, the effects of variations in sleep quality and pattern over consecutive days have received less attention. This study investigated the associations between day-to-day variations in sleep quality and standing balance in healthy subjects. Twenty volunteers (12 females and 8 males; age: 28.8 ± 5.7 years, body mass index: 23.4 ± 3.4 kg/m2, resting heart rate: 63.1 ± 8.7 bpm) with no history of sleep disorders or balance impairments participated in the study. Sleep and balance were assessed over two consecutive days. Sleep quality variations were assessed using sleep diary, actigraphy and heart rate variability (HRV) measures. Sleep was monitored at home, using an unobtrusive wearable device. Balance was assessed in a gait lab using foot centre of pressure (COP) displacement during quiet standing. Subjects with a day-to-day deterioration in sleep quantity and quality (i.e., decreased duration and increased fragmentation, increased nocturnal activity and decreased HRV) exhibited significant changes in balance (i.e., larger COP area, amplitude and standard deviation). Conversely, subjects with no significant alterations in sleep quantity and quality showed no significant changes in COP displacements. These results confirmed our hypothesis that changes in sleep quality and pattern over consecutive days may affect balance.