Automatic detection of apnoea of prematurity

The detection of the incidents of apnoea of prematurity (AP) in preterm infants is important in the intensive care unit, but this detection is often based on simple threshold techniques, which suffer from poor specificity. Three methods for the automatic detection of AP were designed, tested and evaluated using approximately 2426 h of continuous recording from 54 neonates (μ = 44 h and σ = 7 h). The first method was based on the cumulative sum of the time series of heart rate (HR), respiratory rate (RR) and oxygen saturation (SpO(2)) along with the sum of their Shannon entropy. The performance of this method gave 94.53% sensitivity, 74.72% specificity and 77.84% accuracy. The second method was based on the correlation between the time series of HR, RR and SpO(2), which were used as inputs to an artificial neural network. This gave 81.85% sensitivity, 75.83% specificity and 76.78% accuracy. The third method utilized the derivative of the three time series and yielded a performance of 100% sensitivity, 96.19% specificity and 96.79% accuracy. Although not optimized to work in real time, the latter method has the potential for forming the basis of a real time system for the detection of incidents of AP.