A method to detect sleep apnea using residual attention mechanism network from single-lead ECG signal

Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder caused by weakened or suspended breathing during sleep, which seriously affects the work and health of patients. The traditional polysomnography (PSG) detection process is complicated and expensive, which has attracted researchers to explore a rapid detection method based on single-lead ECG signals. However, existing ECG-based sleep apnea detection methods have certain limitations and complexities, mainly relying on human-crafted features. To solve the problem, the paper develops a sleep apnea detection method based on a residual attention mechanism network. The method uses the RR interval signal and the R-peak signal derived from the ECG signal as input, realizes feature extraction through the residual network (ResNet), and adds the SENet attention mechanism to deepen the mining of channel features. Experimental results show that the per-segment accuracy of the proposed method can reach 86.2%. Compared with existing works, its accuracy has increased by 1.1-8.1%. These results show that the proposed residual attention network can effectively use ECG signals to quickly detect sleep apnea. Meanwhile, compared with existing works, the proposed method overcomes the limitations and complexity of human-crafted features in sleep apnea detection research.