Sleep Apnea Detection Using Blood Pressure Signal

Abstract

Sleep apnea is a common respiratory disease. Apnea affects sleep quality, reduces people's life standards, and it can result in death at advanced stage. Therefore the ability to detect the apnea quickly and accurately is important for the treatment of this disease. Apnea is diagnosed by specialists however this is a long and exhausting process. Accordingly, a decision support system that automatically diagnoses apnea has been developed to facilitate this process and make it more objective. The developed decision support system in this study is based on patient's blood pressure signals instead of traditional Polysomnography (PSG) records, which requires various physiological signals measured from the patients. In the examined blood pressure signals, the change that results from each heart beat was determined and heart rate variability (HRV) was calculated based on these changes. At the same time, maximum and minimum amplitude values were found for each change period and amplitude variability vector was created. The features for each epoch were determined using the generated amplitude variability vector and HRV data. Presence of apnea in each epoch is classified with determined features and with the use of "Quadratic SVM" classifier. The Quadratic SVM classifier was trained with 87.5% accuracy and then the system is tested. As a result 75.4% sensitivity and 75% positive predictive values were obtained.