Cascading detection model for prediction of apnea-hypopnea events based on nasal flow and arterial blood oxygen saturation.

Purpose: Sleep apnea and hypopnea syndrome (SAHS) seriously affects sleep quality. In recent years, much research has focused on the detection of SAHS using various physiological signals and algorithms. The purpose of this study is to find an efficient model for detection of apnea-hypopnea events based on nasal flow and SpO signals.

Methods: A 60-s detector and a 10-s detector were cascaded for precise detection of apnea-hypopnea (AH) events. Random forests were adopted for classification of data segments based on morphological features extracted from nasal flow and arterial blood oxygen saturation (SpO). Then the segments' classification results were fed into an event detector to locate the start and end time of every AH event and predict the AH index (AHI).

Results: A retrospective study of 24 subjects' polysomnography recordings was conducted. According to segment analysis, the cascading detection model reached an accuracy of 88.3%. While Pearson's correlation coefficient between estimated AHI and reference AHI was 0.99, in the diagnosis of SAHS severity, the proposed method exhibited a performance with Cohen's kappa coefficient of 0.76.

Conclusions: The cascading detection model is able to detect AH events and provide an estimate of AHI. The results indicate that it has the potential to be a useful tool for SAHS diagnosis.