A Novel Method for the Detection of Sleep Apnea Syndrome Based on Single-Lead ECG Signal

Abstract

The diagnosis of sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) has important clinical significance for the prevention of hypertension, coronary heart disease, arrhythmias, stroke and other diseases. In this paper, a novel method for the detection of SAS based on single-lead Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal was proposed. Firstly, the R-peak points of ECG recordings were pre-detected to calculate RR interval series and ECG-derived respiratory signal (EDR). Then 40 time- and spectral-domain features were extracted and normalized. Finally, support vector machine (SVM) was employed to these features as a classifier to detect SAS events. The performance of the presented method was evaluated using the MIT-BIH Apnea-ECG database, results show that an accuracy of 95% in train sets and an accuracy of 88% in test sets are achievable.