OSASUD: A dataset of stroke unit recordings for the detection of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome

Developing probabilistic ensemble machine learning models for home-based sleep apnea screening using overnight SpO2 data at varying data granularity

PURPOSE

This study aims to develop sleep apnea screening models with overnight SpO2 data, and to investigate the impact of the SpO2 data granularity on model performance.

METHODS

A total of 7,718 SpO2 recordings from the SHHS and MESA datasets were used. Probabilistic ensemble machine learning was employed to predict sleep apnea status at three AHI cutoff points: ≥ 5, ≥ 15, and ≥ 30 events/hour. To investigate the impact of data granularity, SpO2 data were aggregated at 30, 60, and 300 s.

RESULTS

Our models demonstrated good to excellent performance on internal test, with average area under the curve (AUC) values of 0.91, 0.93, and 0.96 for cutoffs ≥ 5, ≥ 15, and ≥ 30 at data granularity of 1 s, respectively. Both sensitivity (0.76, 0.84, 0.89) and specificity (0.87, 0.86, 0.90) ranged from good to excellent across three cutoffs. Positive predictive values (PPV) ranged from excellent to fair (0.97, 0.83, 0.66), and negative predictive values (NPV) ranged from low to excellent (0.43, 0.87, 0.98). Model performance on external test slightly dropped compared to internal test, but still achieved good to excellent AUC above 0.80 across all data granularity and all the three cutoffs. Data granularity of 300 s led to a reduction in performance metrics across all cutoffs.

CONCLUSION

Our models demonstrated superior performance across all three AHI cutoff thresholds compared to existing large sleep apnea screening models, even when considering varying SpO2 data granularity. However, lower data granularity was associated with decreased screening performance, indicating a need for further research in this area.

A periodic split attractor reconstruction method facilitates cardiovascular signal diagnoses and obstructive sleep apnea syndrome monitoring

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a powerful tool to detect cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and health conditions. We proposed a new method for evaluating ECG for efficient medical diagnosis in daily life. By splitting the signal according to the cardiac activity cycle, the periodic split attractor reconstruction (PSAR) method is proposed with time embedding, including three types of splitting methods to show its chaotic domain characteristics. We merged the CVDs dataset and the obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) first-lead ECG signal dataset to validate the performance of PSAR for diagnosis and health monitoring using PSAR density maps as SE-ResNet input features. PSAR under 3 split methods showed different sensitivities for different CVDs. While in OSAS monitoring, PSAR showed good ability to recognize sleep abnormalities.

Adoption of Transformer Neural Network to Improve the Diagnostic Performance of Oximetry for Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Scoring polysomnography for obstructive sleep apnea diagnosis is a laborious, long, and costly process. Machine learning approaches, such as deep neural networks, can reduce scoring time and costs. However, most methods require prior filtering and preprocessing of the raw signal. Our work presents a novel method for diagnosing obstructive sleep apnea using a transformer neural network with learnable positional encoding, which outperforms existing state-of-the-art solutions. This approach has the potential to improve the diagnostic performance of oximetry for obstructive sleep apnea and reduce the time and costs associated with traditional polysomnography. Contrary to existing approaches, our approach performs annotations at one-second granularity. Allowing physicians to interpret the model's outcome. In addition, we tested different positional encoding designs as the first layer of the model, and the best results were achieved using a learnable positional encoding based on an autoencoder with structural novelty. In addition, we tried different temporal resolutions with various granularity levels from 1 to 360 s. All experiments were carried out on an independent test set from the public OSASUD dataset and showed that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art solutions with a satisfactory AUC of 0.89, accuracy of 0.80, and F1-score of 0.79.

Novel method combining multiscale attention entropy of overnight blood oxygen level and machine learning for easy sleep apnea screening

Objective

Sleep apnea is a common sleep disorder affecting a significant portion of the population, but many apnea patients remain undiagnosed because existing clinical tests are invasive and expensive. This study aimed to develop a method for easy sleep apnea screening.

Methods

Three supervised machine learning algorithms, including logistic regression, support vector machine, and light gradient boosting machine, were applied to develop apnea screening models at two apnea-hypopnea index cutoff thresholds: ≥ 5 and ≥ 30 events/hours. The SpO2 recordings of the Sleep Heart Health Study database (N = 5786) were used for model training, validation, and test. Multiscale entropy analysis was performed to derive a set of multiscale attention entropy features from the SpO2 recordings. Demographic features including age, sex, body mass index, and blood pressure were also used. The dependency among the multiscale attention entropy features were handled with the independent component analysis.

Results

For cutoff ≥ 5/hours, logistic regression model achieved the highest Matthew's correlation coefficient (0.402) and area under the curve (0.747), and reasonably good sensitivity (75.38%), specificity (74.02%), and positive predictive value (92.94%). For cutoff ≥ 30/hours, support vector machine model achieved the highest Matthew's correlation coefficient (0.545) and area under the curve (0.823), and good sensitivity (82.00%), specificity (82.69%), and negative predictive value (95.53%).

Conclusions

Our models achieved better performance than existing methods and have the potential to be integrated with home-use pulse oximeters.

Sleep and Stroke: Opening Our Eyes to Current Knowledge of a Key Relationship

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

To elucidate the interconnection between sleep and stroke.

RECENT FINDINGS

Growing data support a bidirectional relationship between stroke and sleep. In particular, there is strong evidence that sleep-disordered breathing plays a pivotal role as risk factor and concur to worsening functional outcome. Conversely, for others sleep disorders (e.g., insomnia, restless legs syndrome, periodic limb movements of sleep, REM sleep behavior disorder), the evidence is weak. Moreover, sleep disturbances are highly prevalent also in chronic stroke and concur to worsening quality of life of patients. Promising novel technologies will probably allow, in a near future, to guarantee a screening of commonest sleep disturbances in a larger proportion of patients with stroke. Sleep assessment and management should enter in the routinary evaluation of stroke patients, of both acute and chronic phase. Future research should focus on the efficacy of specific sleep intervention as a therapeutic option for stroke patients.