Deep Learning for Detecting Sleep Apnea from ECG Signals

Sleep apnea (SA) is a common sleep disorders affecting the sleep quality. Therefore the automatic SA detection has far-reaching implications for patients and physicians. In this paper, a novel approach is developed based on deep neural network (DNN) for automatic diagnosis SA. To this end, five features are extracted from electrocardiogram (ECG) signals through wavelet decomposition and sample entropy. The deep neural network is constructed by two-layer stacked sparse autoencoder (SSAE) network and one softmax layer. The softmax layer is added at the top of the SSAE network for diagnosing SA. Afterwards, the SSAE network can get more effective high-level features from raw features. The experimental results reveal that the performance of deep neural network can accomplish an accuracy of 96.66%, a sensitivity of 96.25%, and a specificity of 97%. In addition, the performance of deep neural network outperforms the comparison models including support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and extreme learning machine (ELM). Finally, the experimental results reveal that the proposed method can be valid applied to automatic SA event detection.