Machine Learning for Sleep Apnea Detection with Unattended Sleep Monitoring at Home

Abstract

Sleep apnea is a common and strongly under-diagnosed severe sleep-related respiratory disorder with periods of disrupted or reduced breathing during sleep. To diagnose sleep apnea, sleep data are collected with either polysomnography or polygraphy and scored by a sleep expert. We investigate in this work the use of supervised machine learning to automate the analysis of polygraphy data from the A3 study containing more than 7,400 hours of sleep monitoring data from 579 patients. We conduct a systematic comparative study of classification performance and resource use with different combinations of 27 classifiers and four sleep signals. The classifiers achieve up to 0.8941 accuracy (kappa: 0.7877) when using all four signal types simultaneously and up to 0.8543 accuracy (kappa: 0.7080) with only one signal, i.e., oxygen saturation. Methods based on deep learning outperform other methods by a large margin. All deep learning methods achieve nearly the same maximum classification performance even when they have very different architectures and sizes. When jointly accounting for classification performance, resource consumption and the ability to achieve with less training data high classification performance, we find that convolutional neural networks substantially outperform the other classifiers.