Classification of Cheyne-Stokes breathing and obstructive sleep apnea using ECG.

High cost of diagnostic studies to detect sleep disordered breathing and lack of availability of certified sleep laboratories in all inhabited areas make investigation of alternative methods of detecting sleep disordered breathing attractive. This study aimed to explore the possibility of discerning obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) from Cheyne-Stokes respiration (CSR) using overnight electrocardiography (ECG). Polysomnographic and ECG signals were acquired from the 13 OSA and 7 CSR volunteer subjects. Two signals: R-Wave Attenuation (RWA) and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) series were derived from the ECG. Using frequency domain analysis, various frequency bands in the power spectrum of RWA and HRV signals were identified that showed sensitivity to OSA and CSR events. A three-stage algorithm was developed to detect and differentiate OSA events from CSR events using RWA and HRV analysis. To test the algorithm, the ECG data was divided into fifteen minute epochs for analysis. Seventy two epochs containing OSA and 72 with CSR events were selected. 48 OSA clips and 48 CSR clips were randomly selected to form the training set. The remaining 24 clips in each category formed the test set. This method produced an average sensitivity of 95.83% and specificity of 79.16% in the training set and sensitivity of 87.5% and a specificity of 75% in the test set.