Heart rate variability time domain features in automated prediction of diabetes in rat

Diabetes is a very common occurring disease, diagnosed by hyperglycemia. The established mode of diagnosis is the analysis of blood glucose level with the help of a hand-held glucometer. Nowadays, it is also known for affecting multi-organ functions, particularly the microvasculature of the cardiovascular system. In this work, an alternative diagnostic system based on the heart rate variability (HRV) analysis and artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) have been proposed. The experiment and data recording has been performed on male Wister rats of 10–12 week of age and 200 ± 20 gm of weight. The digital lead-I electrocardiogram (ECG) data are recorded from control (n = 5) and Streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats (n = 5). Nine time-domain linear HRV parameters are computed from 60 s of ECG data epochs and used for the training and testing of backpropagation ANN and SVM. Total 526 (334 Control and 192 diabetics) such datasets are computed for the testing of ANN for the identification of the diabetic conditions. The ANN has been optimized for architecture 9:5:1 (Input: hidden: output neurons, respectively) with the optimized learning rate parameter at 0.02. With this network, a very good classification accuracy of 96.2% is achieved. While similar accuracy of 95.2% is attained using SVM. Owing to the successful implementation of HRV parameters based automated classifiers for diabetic conditions, a non-invasive, ECG based online prognostic system can be developed for accurate and non-invasive prediction of the diabetic condition.