Causal analyses to study autonomic regulation during acute head-out water immersion, head-down tilt and supine position

The contribution of granger causality analysis to our understanding of cardiovascular homeostasis: from cardiovascular and respiratory interactions to central autonomic network control

Homeostatic regulation plays a fundamental role in maintenance of multicellular life. At different scales and in different biological systems, this principle allows a better understanding of biological organization. Consequently, a growing interest in studying cause-effect relations between physiological systems has emerged, such as in the fields of cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory regulations. For this, mathematical approaches such as Granger causality (GC) were applied to the field of cardiovascular physiology in the last 20 years, overcoming the limitations of previous approaches and offering new perspectives in understanding cardiac, vascular and respiratory homeostatic interactions. In clinical practice, continuous recording of clinical data of hospitalized patients or by telemetry has opened new applicability for these approaches with potential early diagnostic and prognostic information. In this review, we describe a theoretical background of approaches based on linear GC in time and frequency domains applied to detect couplings between time series of RR intervals, blood pressure and respiration. Interestingly, these tools help in understanding the contribution of homeostatic negative feedback and the anticipatory feedforward mechanisms in homeostatic cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory controls. We also describe experimental and clinical results based on these mathematical tools, consolidating previous experimental and clinical evidence on the coupling in cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory studies. Finally, we propose perspectives allowing to complete the understanding of these interactions between cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory systems, as well as the interplay between brain and cardiac, and vascular and respiratory systems, offering a high integrative view of cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory homeostatic regulation.

Concomitant evaluation of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular controls via Geweke spectral causality to assess the propensity to postural syncope

The evaluation of propensity to postural syncope necessitates the concomitant characterization of the cardiovascular and cerebrovascular controls and a method capable of disentangling closed loop relationships and decomposing causal links in the frequency domain. We applied Geweke spectral causality (GSC) to assess cardiovascular control from heart period and systolic arterial pressure variability and cerebrovascular regulation from mean arterial pressure and mean cerebral blood velocity variability in 13 control subjects and 13 individuals prone to develop orthostatic syncope. Analysis was made at rest in supine position and during head-up tilt at 60°, well before observing presyncope signs. Two different linear model structures were compared, namely bivariate autoregressive and bivariate dynamic adjustment classes. We found that (i) GSC markers did not depend on the model structure; (ii) the concomitant assessment of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular controls was useful for a deeper comprehension of postural disturbances; (iii) orthostatic syncope appeared to be favored by the loss of a coordinated behavior between the baroreflex feedback and mechanical feedforward pathway in the frequency band typical of the baroreflex functioning during the postural challenge, and by a weak cerebral autoregulation as revealed by the increased strength of the pressure-to-flow link in the respiratory band. GSC applied to spontaneous cardiovascular and cerebrovascular oscillations is a promising tool for describing and monitoring disturbances associated with posture modification.

Granger causality test with nonlinear neural-network-based methods: Python package and simulation study

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Causality defined by Granger in 1969 is a widely used concept, particularly in neuroscience and economics. As there is an increasing interest in nonlinear causality research, a Python package with a neural-network-based causality analysis approach was created. It allows performing causality tests using neural networks based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), or Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). The aim of this paper is to present the nonlinear method for causality analysis and the created Python package.

METHODS

The created functions with the autoregressive (AR) and Generalized Radial Basis Functions (GRBF) neural network models were tested on simulated signals in two cases: with nonlinear dependency and with absence of causality from Y to X signal. The train-test split (70/30) was used. Errors obtained on the test set were compared using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to determine the presence of the causality. For the chosen model, the proposed method of study the change of causality over time was presented.

RESULTS

In the case when X was a polynomial of Y, nonlinear methods were able to detect the causality, while the AR model did not manage to indicate it. The best results (in terms of the prediction accuracy) were obtained for the MLP for the lag of 150 (MSE equal to 0.011, compared to 0.041 and 0.036 for AR and GRBF, respectively). When there was no causality between the signals, none of the proposed and AR models did indicate false causality, while it was detected by GRBF models in one case. Only the proposed models gave the expected results in each of the tested scenarios.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed method appeared to be superior to the compared methods. They were able to detect non-linear causality, make accurate forecasting and not indicate false causality. The created package enables easy usage of neural networks to study the causal relationship between signals. The neural-networks-based approach is a suitable method that allows the detection of a nonlinear causal relationship, which cannot be detected by the classical Granger method. Unlike other similar tools, the package allows for the study of changes in causality over time.

Parasympathetic-Sympathetic Causal Interactions Assessed by Time-Varying Multivariate Autoregressive Modeling of Electrodermal Activity and Heart-Rate-Variability

OBJECTIVE

Most of the bodily functions are regulated by multiple interactions between the parasympathetic (PNS) and sympathetic (SNS) nervous system. In this study, we propose a novel framework to quantify the causal flow of information between PNS and SNS through the analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) and electrodermal activity (EDA) signals.

METHODS

Our method is based on a time-varying (TV) multivariate autoregressive model of EDA and HRV time-series and incorporates physiologically inspired assumptions by estimating the Directed Coherence in a specific frequency range. The statistical significance of the observed interactions is assessed by a bootstrap procedure purposely developed to infer causalities in the presence of both TV model coefficients and TV model residuals (i.e., heteroskedasticity). We tested our method on two different experiments designed to trigger a sympathetic response, i.e., a hand-grip task (HG) and a mental-computation task (MC).

RESULTS

Our results show a parasympathetic driven interaction in the resting state, which is consistent across different studies. The onset of the stressful stimulation triggers a cascade of events characterized by the presence or absence of the PNS-SNS interaction and changes in the directionality. Despite similarities between the results related to the two tasks, we reveal differences in the dynamics of the PNS-SNS interaction, which might reflect different regulatory mechanisms associated with different stressors.

CONCLUSION

We estimate causal coupling between PNS and SNS through MVAR modeling of EDA and HRV time-series.

SIGNIFICANCE

Our results suggest promising future applicability to investigate more complex contexts such as affective and pathological scenarios.