Automatic detection of sleep apnea events based on inter-band energy ratio obtained from multi-band EEG signal.

Sleep apnea is a potentially serious sleep disorder characterised by abnormal pauses in breathing. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal analysis plays an important role for detecting sleep apnea events. In this research work, a method is proposed on the basis of inter-band energy ratio features obtained from multi-band EEG signals for subject-specific classification of sleep apnea and non-apnea events. The K-nearest neighbourhood classifier is used for classification purpose. Unlike conventional methods, instead of classifying apnea patient and healthy person, the objective here is to differentiate apnea and non-apnea events of an apnea patient, which makes the task very challenging. Extensive experimentation is carried out on EEG data of several subjects obtained from a publicly available database. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that the proposed method offers very satisfactory classification performance in terms of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy.

Sleep Apnea Detection Based on Rician Modeling of Feature Variation in Multiband EEG Signal.

Sleep apnea, a serious sleep disorder affecting a large population, causes disruptions in breathing during sleep. In this paper, an automatic apnea detection scheme is proposed using single lead electroencephalography (EEG) signal to discriminate apnea patients and healthy subjects as well as to deal with the difficult task of classifying apnea and nonapnea events of an apnea patient. A unique multiband subframe based feature extraction scheme is developed to capture the feature variation pattern within a frame of EEG data, which is shown to exhibit significantly different characteristics in apnea and nonapnea frames. Such within-frame feature variation can be better represented by some statistical measures and characteristic probability density functions. It is found that use of Rician model parameters along with some statistical measures can offer very robust feature qualities in terms of standard performance criteria, such as Bhattacharyya distance and geometric separability index. For the purpose of classification, proposed features are used in K Nearest Neighbor classifier. From extensive experimentations and analysis on three different publicly available databases it is found that the proposed method offers superior classification performance in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy.