Automated detection of sleep apnea in infants: A multi-modal approach

This study explores the use and applicability of two minimally invasive sensors, electrocardiogram (ECG) and pulse oximetry, in addressing the high costs and difficulty associated with the early detection of sleep apnea hypopnea syndrome in infants. An existing dataset of 396 scored overnight polysomnography recordings were used to train and test a linear discriminants classifier. The dataset contained data from healthy infants, infants diagnosed with sleep apnea, infants with siblings who had died from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and pre-term infants. Features were extracted from the ECG and pulse-oximetry data and used to train the classifier. The performance of the classifier was evaluated using a leave-one-out cross-validation scheme and an accuracy of 66.7% was achieved, with a specificity of 67.0% and a sensitivity of 58.1%. Although the performance of the system is not yet at the level required for clinical use, this work forms an important step in demonstrating the validity and potential for such low-cost and minimally invasive diagnostic systems.