Time- Frequency based Renyi entropy of heart rate variability for newborn seizure detection

The time-frequency (TF) version of Renyi entropy, which measures the information content and complexity of a signal, is used here as a feature in the classification of the newborn heart rate variability (HRV) as either corresponding to seizure or non-seizure. The newborn HRV is initially mapped to the TF domain using the modified B distribution (MBD). The time-frequency distribution (TFD) of HRV is post-processed before the Renyi entropy is computed. This post-processing method uses an image processing technique called component linking to identify the true HRV components and localize them in the TF plane. The results obtained so far show that the HRV corresponding to non-seizure can be discriminated from those corresponding to seizure using TF-based Renyi entropy with 78.57% sensitivity and 83.33 % specificity.