Redundancy and synergy in interactions among basic cardiovascular oscillations

Abstract

The cardiovascular control system comprises a complex network of various control mechanisms operating on many time scales resulting in complex and mutually interconnected output signals (e.g. heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressures). The analysis of these interconnections could noninvasively provide an information on the regulatory mechanisms involved in cardiovascular control and thus could be potentially applied to better characterize cardiovascular dysregulation in pathological conditions. Our study demonstrates that the strength of interactions among signals changes with the time scale and as a response to changed autonomic state (orthostasis compared to supine rest). Novel insight regarding the interaction between two signals (sources) when influencing a target (third) signal could be obtained by the information-theoretic analysis of sources' redundancy and synergy.