Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a common sleep-breathing disorder that highly reduces the quality of human life. The most powerful method for the detection and classification of sleep apnea is the Polysomnogram. However, this method is time-consuming and cost-inefficient. Therefore, several methods focus on using electrocardiogram (ECG) signals to detect sleep apnea. This paper proposed a novel automated approach to detect and classify apneic events from single-lead ECG signals. Wavelet Scattering Transformation (WST) was applied to the ECG signals to decompose the signal into smaller segments. Then, a set of features, including higher-order statistics and entropy-based features, was extracted from the WST coefficients to formulate a search space. The obtained features were fed to a random forest classifier to classify the ECG segments. The experiment was validated using the 10-fold and hold-out cross-validation methods, which resulted in an accuracy of 91.65% and 90.35%, respectively. The findings were compared with different classifiers to show the significance of the proposed approach. The proposed approach achieved better performance measures than most of the existing methodologies.
Keywords: ECG signals processing; Obstructive Sleep Apnea; automatic detection; entropy-based features; random forest; wavelet scattering transformation.