Application of Permutation Entropy in the stratification of patients with chagas disease

Diego Rodrigo Cornejo Luque1, Maria Fernanda Rodriguez Pilco1, Luz Alexandra Diaz Pareja1, Esteban Segundo Alvarez2, Miguel Vizcardo1
1Universidad Nacional de San Agustin de Arequipa, 2Universidad Central de Venezuela


Abstract

Chagas disease is an endemic disease that in recent decades has ceased to be a rural disease to become a mainly urban disease, becoming a public health problem due to being a life-threatening disease of which 70 million people are at risk of infection. This disease, which has a cardiac involvement in its chronic phase, can often be silent and asymptomatic, because of this the establishment of early markers in this type of patients is of great interest. To achieve this goal this study proposes the use of the permutation entropy (PE) which has been shown satisfactory results in the analysis of hearth rhythm and the differentiation between health people and people who suffered of congestive heart failure or also known as heart failure. This study analize three groups: 83 volunteers (Control), 102 patients with positive serology and no cardiac involvement diagnosed by conventional non-invasive methods (CH1) and 107 patients with positive serology and mild to moderate incipient heart failure. The data used comes from the 24-hour ECG record in 288 frames of 5-minute the RR intervals from each of the three groups. The analysis performed shows that there are significant differences between healthy patients (Control) and those affected with Chagas disease that have positive serology and cardiac involvement; achieving a satisfactory classifi- cation with 90% to 100% specificity and sensitivity, making this study a promising precedent for the development of a low-cost, non-invasive method for detecting heart failure in asymptomatic patients.