Application of Empirical Mode Decomposition to Cardiorespiratory Synchronization

Abstract A scheme based on the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and syn-chrogram introduced by Wu and Hu [Phys. Rev. E 74, 051917 (2006)] to study cardiorespiratory synchronization is reviewed. In the scheme, an experimental res-piratory signal is decomposed into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and one of these IMFs is selected as a respiratory rhythm to construct the cardiorespiratory synchrogram incorporating with heartbeat data. The analysis of 20 data sets from ten young (21–34 years old) and ten elderly (68–81 years old) rigorously screened healthy subjects shows that regularity of respiratory signals plays a dominant role in cardiorespiratory synchronization