School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2012 Apr;59(4):946-55. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2011.2179937. Epub 2011 Dec 15.
Recently, the concept of phase synchronization of two weakly coupled oscillators has raised a great research interest and has been applied to characterize synchronization phenomenon in physiological data. Phase synchronization of cardiorespiratory coupling is often studied by a synchrogram analysis, a graphical tool investigating the relationship between instantaneous phases of two signals. Although several techniques have been proposed to automatically quantify the synchrogram, most of them require a preselection of a phase-locking ratio by trial and error. One technique does not require this information; however, it is based on the power spectrum of phase's distribution in the synchrogram, which is vulnerable to noise. This study aims to introduce a new technique to automatically quantify the synchrogram by studying its dynamic structure. Our technique exploits recurrence plot analysis, which is a well-established tool for characterizing recurring patterns and nonstationarities in experiments. We applied our technique to detect synchronization in simulated and measured infants' cardiorespiratory data. Our results suggest that the proposed technique is able to systematically detect synchronization in noisy and chaotic data without preselecting the phase-locking ratio. By embedding phase information of the synchrogram into phase space, the phase-locking ratio is automatically unveiled as the number of attractors.
最近,两个弱耦合振荡器的相位同步概念引起了广泛的研究兴趣,并被应用于生理数据中的同步现象的特征描述。心呼吸耦合的相位同步通常通过同步图分析来研究,这是一种研究两个信号瞬时相位之间关系的图形工具。尽管已经提出了几种自动量化同步图的技术,但大多数技术都需要通过反复试验来预选锁相比。有一种技术不需要此信息,但它基于同步图中相位分布的功率谱,而功率谱容易受到噪声的影响。本研究旨在通过研究其动态结构,引入一种自动量化同步图的新技术。我们的技术利用了递归图分析,这是一种用于描述实验中重复模式和非平稳性的成熟工具。我们将我们的技术应用于模拟和测量的婴儿心呼吸数据中以检测同步。我们的结果表明,该技术能够在没有预选锁相比的情况下,系统地检测噪声和混沌数据中的同步。通过将同步图的相位信息嵌入相空间中,锁相比自动揭示为吸引子的数量。