<i>CardioRVAR</i>: A New R Package and Shiny Application for the Evaluation of Closed-Loop Cardiovascular Interactions

Abstract

CardioRVAR is a new R package designed for the complete evaluation of closed-loop cardiovascular interactions and baroreflex sensitivity estimated from continuous non-invasive heart rate and blood pressure recordings. In this work, we highlight the importance of this software tool in the context of human cardiovascular and autonomic neurophysiology. A summary of the main algorithms that CardioRVAR uses are reviewed, and the workflow of this package is also discussed. We present the results obtained from this tool after its application in three clinical settings. These results support the potential clinical and scientific applications of this tool. The open-source tool can be downloaded from a public GitHub repository, as well as its specific Shiny application, CardioRVARapp. The open-source nature of the tool may benefit the future continuation of this work.

Keywords

• autonomic nervous system
• baroreflex sensitivity
• vector autoregressive modeling
• discrete wavelet transform
• R programming environment