Redundant and Synergistic Information Transfer in Cardiovascular and Cardiorespiratory Variability

In the framework of information dynamics, new tools are emerging which allow one to quantify how the information provided by two source processes about a target process results from the contribution of each source and from the interaction between the sources. We present the first implementation of these tools in the assessment of short-term cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory variability, by introducing two strategies for the decomposition of the information transferred to heart period (HP) variability from systolic arterial pressure (SAP) and respiration flow (RF) variability. Several measures based on the notion of transfer entropy (TE) are defined to quantify joint, individual and redundant/synergistic information transfer, and are then estimated from the series of HP, SAP and RF obtained from healthy subjects during head-up tilt and paced breathing protocols. Our results show that the proposed information decomposition methods provide an enhanced view on cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory regulation.