On multiscale entropy analysis for physiological data

We perform an analysis of cardiac data using multiscale entropy as proposed in Costa et al. [Multiscale entropy analysis of complex physiological time series, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 (2002) 068102]. We reproduce the signatures of the multiscale entropy for the three cases of young healthy hearts, atrial fibrillation and congestive heart failure. We show that one has to be cautious how to interpret these signatures in terms of the underlying dynamics. In particular, we show that different dynamical systems can exhibit the same signatures depending on the sampling time, and that similar systems may have different signatures depending on the time scales involved. Besides the total amount of data we identify the sampling time, the correlation time and the period of possible nonlinear oscillations as important time scales which have to be involved in a detailed analysis of the signatures of multiscale entropies. We illustrate our ideas with the Lorenz equation as a simple deterministic chaotic system.