A novel deep learning-based approach for sleep apnea detection using single-lead ECG signals

Sleep apnea (SA) is a type of sleep disorder characterized by snoring and chronic sleeplessness, which can lead to serious conditions such as high blood pressure, heart failure, and cardiomyopathy (enlargement of the muscle tissue of the heart). The electrocardiogram (ECG) plays a critical role in identifying SA since it might reveal abnormal cardiac activity. Recent research on ECG-based SA detection has focused on feature engineering techniques that extract specific characteristics from multiple-lead ECG signals and use them as classification model inputs. In this study, a novel method of feature extraction based on the detection of S peaks is proposed to enhance the detection of adjacent SA segments using a single-lead ECG. In particular, ECG features collected from a single lead (V2) are used to identify SA episodes. On the extracted features, a CNN model is trained to detect SA. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method detects SA from single-lead ECG data is more accurate than existing state-of-the-art methods, with 91.13% classification accuracy, 92.58% sensitivity, and 88.75% specificity. Moreover, the further usage of features associated with the S peaks enhances the classification accuracy by 0.85%. Our findings indicate that the proposed machine learning system has the potential to be an effective method for detecting SA episodes.