Mutual Information Function in Respirocardial Coordinations of Healthy Human Neonates in Quiet and Active Sleep

The complexity of heart rate fluctuations (HRF) is based on several interacting physiological mechanisms operating on different time scales. No prominent time scale for HRF complexity analysis is given a priori. The aim of this work is to discriminate the active and quiet sleep of healthy full-term neonates by quantitatively assessing respirocardial coordination dynamics using the recently introduced complexity parameter mutual information function (MIF). Representing the different time scales of information flow in autonomic nervous system, MIF carries information on a wider scope of complex interdependencies t…