In the present work, an ischaemic process, mainly focused on the reperfusion stage, is studied using the informational causal entropy-complexity plane. Ischaemic wall behavior under this condition was analyzed through wall thickness and ventricular pressure variations, acquired during an obstructive flow maneuver performed on left coronary arteries of surgically instrumented animals. Basically, the induction of ischaemia depends on the temporary occlusion of left circumflex coronary artery (which supplies blood to the posterior left ventricular wall) that lasts for a few seconds. Normal perfusion of the wall was then reestablished while the anterior ventricular wall remained adequately perfused during the entire maneuver. The obtained results showed that system dynamics could be effectively described by entropy-complexity loops, in both abnormally and well perfused walls. These results could contribute to making an objective indicator of the recovery heart tissues after an ischaemic process, in a way to quantify the restoration of myocardial behavior after the supply of oxygen to the ventricular wall was suppressed for a brief period.

The aim of this study is to formulate a new methodology based upon informational tools to detect patients with cardiac arrhythmias. As it is known, sudden death is the consequence of a final arrhythmia, and here lies the relevance of the efforts aimed at the early detection of arrhythmias. The information content in the time series from an electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is conveyed in the form of a probability distribution function, to compute the permutation entropy proposed by Bandt and Pompe. This selection was made seeking its remarkable conceptual simplicity, computational speed, and robustness to noise. In this work, two well-known databases were used, one containing normal sinus rhythms and another one containing arrhythmias, both from the MIT medical databank. For different values of embedding time delay $\tau$ , normalized permutation entropy and statistical complexity measure are computed to finally represent them on the horizontal and vertical axes, respectively, which define the causal plane $H\times C$ . To improve the results obtained in previous works, a feature set composed by these two magnitudes is built to train the following supervised machine learning algorithms: random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and $k$ nearest neighbors (kNN). To evaluate the performance of each classification technique, a 10-fold cross-validation scheme repeated 10 times was implemented. Finally, to select the best model, three quality parameters were computed, namely, accuracy, the area under the receiver operative characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC), and the F1-score. The results obtained show that the best classification model to detect the ECG coming from arrhythmic patients is RF. The values of the quality parameters were at the same levels reported in the available literature using a larger data set, thus supporting this proposal that uses a very small-sized feature space to train the model later used to classify. Summarizing, the attained results show the possibility to discriminate both groups of patients, with normal sinus rhythm or arrhythmic ECG, showing a promising efficiency in the definition of new markers for the detection of cardiovascular pathologies.

In the present chapter, we made a detailed analysis of the different regimes of certain chaotic systems and their correspondence with the change in the normalized Shannon entropy, Statistical Complexity, and Fisher information measure. We construct a bidimensional plane composed of the selection of a pair of the informational tools mentioned above (a casual plane is defined), in which the different dynamical regimes appeared very clear and give more information of the underlying process. In such a way, a plane composed of the normalized Shannon entropy, statistical complexity, normalized Shannon entropy, and Fisher information measure can be applied to follow the changes in the behavior variations of the nonlinear systems.

The objective of this work is to present a novel methodology based on the computation of a couple of geometric characteristics of the position of the data points in 1D signal to propose an alternative estimation of signal entropy. The conditions to be fulfilled by the signal are minimal; only those necessary to meet the sampling theorem requirement are enough. This work shows some examples in which the proposed methodology can distinguish among signals that cannot be differentiated by other in-use alternatives. Additionally an original example where the usual ordinal pattern algorithm to compute entropy is not applicable, is presented and analyzed. The proposal developed through this work carries some advantages over other alternatives and constitutes a true advancement in the pathway to compute the distribution function of the sequential points of 1D signals later used to compute the entropy of the signal.

In the present work a method for the detection of the cardiac pathology known as atrial fibrillation is proposed by calculating different information, statistics and other nonlinear measures over ECG signals. The original database contains records corresponding to patients who are diagnosed with this disease as well as healthy subjects. To formulate the dataset the Rényi permutation entropy, Fisher information measure, statistical complexity, Lyapunov exponent and fractal dimension were calculated, in order to determine how to combine this features to optimize the identification of the signals coming from ECG with the above mentioned cardiac pathology. With the aim to improve the results obtained in previous studies, a classification method based upon decision trees algorithms is implemented. Later a Montecarlo simulation of one thousand trials is performed with a seventy percent randomly selected from the dataset dedicated to train the classifier and the remaining thirty percent reserved to test in every trial. The quality of the classification is assessed through the computation of the area under the receiver operation characteristic curve (ROC), the F1-score and other classical performance metrics, such as the balanced accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predicted values. The results show that the incorporation of all these features to the dataset when are employed to train the classifier in the training task produces the best classification, in such a way that the largest quality parameter is achieved.