Universal characteristics of evolution and development are inherent in fetal autonomic brain maturation.

Adverse prenatal environmental influences to the developing fetus are associated with mental and cardiovascular disease in later life. Universal developmental characteristics such as self-organization, pattern formation, and adaptation in the growing information processing system have not yet been sufficiently analyzed with respect to description of normal fetal development and identification of developmental disturbances. Fetal heart rate patterns are the only non-invasive order parameter of the developing autonomic brain available with respect to the developing complex organ system.

Reconstruction of multiple neuromagnetic sources using augmented evolution strategies-- a comparative study.

The localization of dipolar sources in the brain based on electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) data is a frequent problem in the neurosciences. Deterministic standard approaches such as the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) method often have problems in finding the global optimum of the associated nonlinear optimization function, when two or more dipoles are to be reconstructed. In such cases, probabilistic approaches turned out to be superior, but their applicability in neuromagnetic source localizations is not yet satisfactory.

Low HRV entropy is strongly associated with myocardial infarction.

Heart rate variability (HRV) is a marker of autonomous activity in the heart. An important application of HRV measures is the stratification of mortality risk after myocardial infarction. Our hypothesis is that the information entropy of HRV, a non-linear approach, is a suitable measure for this assessment.