Nonlinear noise reduction for electrocardiograms.

The electrical activity of the heart usually shows dynamical behavior which is neither periodic nor deterministically chaotic: The interbeat intervals seem to contain a random component. Although long term predictions are thus impossible, good predictions can be made for times smaller than one heart cycle. This fact is used in order to suppress measurement errors by a local geometric projection method which was originally developed for chaotic signals. The result constitutes evidence that techniques of time series analysis based on chaos theory can be useful despite the fact that very few natural phenomena have been actually established to be deterministically chaotic. (c) 1996 American Institute of Physics.