Computer analysis of blood pressure and heart rate variability is increasingly employed to obtain information on the mechanisms responsible for cardiovascular regulation in different physiological and pathological conditions.
Various aspects related to the methodology and the clinical relevance of this approach were previously addressed in the book “Blood Pressure and Heart Rate Variability”, published by IOS Press in 1992.
Since then, progress has been made in the field of data measurement, data analysis as well as in the physiological and clinical interpretation of the results. For example, new siftware procedures for the estimation of time-frequency distributions have been developed to dynamically evaluate the time modulation of spectral powers in different daily life conditions. Moreover, methods have been implemented for the broad band spectral analysis of blood pressure and heart rate variablity. These techniques resulted in important new tools for the understanding of the regulation of the heart and the peripheral circulation in terms of 1/f processes and non-linear systems. Furthermore, recently obtained experimental data and novel mathematical models have shed new light on the links between blood pressure and heart rate and on the interrelationship between the variability of multiple cardiovascular signals and respiratory activity. Such a multivariate approach to the analysis of variablity in cardiovascular signals has turned out to be much more informative than the traditional univariate methodologies and has been shown to provide a deeper insight into cardiovascular regulation.
The present book includes the contributions on these and other innovative issues given by leading experts in two recent workshops held under the patronage of the European Society for Engineering and Medicine and the European Society of Hypertension.
We hope that investigators working in this field will find in this volume a comprehensive and updated state-of-the art and a helpful reference for their research and clinical activity.
Marco Di Rienzo
Giuseppe Mancia
Giafranco Parati
Antonio Pedotti
Alberto Zanchetti