Entropy characteristics of heart rate wavelet multiscale components in epileptic children before and after seizures

In this work, we analyze the information content of the multiple time scale components of heart rate variability (HRV) in children with focal epilepsy. HRV components are extracted from 30 pediatric patients, monitored 10 min and 10 s before and after focal epileptic seizures, using wavelet multiscale decomposition (with 5, 15, 30, 60, 120, 180 s time scale), and then characterized computing Entropy (E), permutation entropy (PE), conditional entropy (CE) and information storage (IS). Moving from preictal to postictal windows, we find statistically significant differences in the CE and IS values of HRV components at short time scales, which reflect autonomic imbalance and appear as potential candidates of descriptive features for HRV monitoring in epilepsy.