Cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory coupling analysis — State of the art and future perspectives

In recent years, it became of great importance in different fields of sciences to understand how regulatory systems interact with each other (directly or indirectly, causally or non-causally). Therefore, especially in the medical field several methods for analyzing couplings in biological systems have been developed to quantify the physiological regulatory mechanisms especially of the cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory system. Possibilities for application of these methods are numerous and varied, ranging from linear to nonlinear approaches. In this paper we give a condensed overview of the state of the art of the most prominent applied approaches and their future perspectives.