Prognostic value of Poincare plot indexes in chronic heart failure patients

The identification of prognostic indexes in chronic heart failure patients represents a challenging task in the analysis of HRV. To this purpose we assessed the prognostic value of novel computer-generated quantitative descriptors of Poincari plots (PPlots) of HRV in a case-control study over 13 CHF patients who experienced cardiac death and 13 matched CHF controls. All subjects had a Holter recording with computation of SDNN and PPlots analysis. While visual classification of PPlots and SDNN did not significantly differentiate controls from deceased patients, a highly significant association with outcome was found for quantitative PPlots indexes. This preliminary study shows that automatic quantification of PPlots allows a better discrimination between patients at risk of cardiac event and controls than visual classification of plot features and time-domain HRV.