A new approach to identify obstructive sleep apnea using an optimal orthogonal wavelet filter bank with ECG signals

Abstract Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a severe sleep ailment. It manifests when a person's breathing is interrupted while sleeping due to an inadequate supply of oxygen to the brain and physical body. The detection of OSA at an early stage can provide better mitigation from severe health impairments. An accurate method to detect OSA can improve the quality of life significantly. The computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system of OSA developed using single-channel, single-signal physiological signals can efficiently cut costs, and can be used even at home. Therefore, a simple and portable OSA-CAD system using single-channel electrocardiogram (ECG) is introduced in this paper. This study proposes the automated identification of ECG signal affected from OSA employing an optimal two-band filter bank (FB) technique. While designing the filter bank, our central objective is to minimize the spectral localization, subjected to exact regeneration and regularity criteria. The identification of OSA using ECG signals is duly based on the newly designed FB. Using the proposed FB, ECG signals were split into wavelet frequency-bands (WFBs). The fuzzy-entropy (FUEN) and the log of signal-energy (LOEN) of WFBs have been employed as the distinguishing features. The 35-fold cross-validation technique was exercised using various classifiers, namely K nearest neighbor (KNN), decision tree (DT), linear discriminant, logistic regression, and support vector machine (SVM) to separate into normal and OSA affected subjects. The proposed model has attained respective highest average accuracy (AVAC), average sensitivity (AVSE), average specificity (AVSP) and F1-score of 90.87%, 92.43% 88.33% and 92.61%. Our proposed model outperformed the existing systems developed using the same database and was found to be more efficient, robust, and easy to use.