Estimating daytime sleepiness with previous night electroencephalography, electrooculography, and electromyography spectrograms in patients with suspected sleep apnea using a convolutional neural network

Nocturnal oxygen resaturation parameters are associated with cardiorespiratory comorbidities

BACKGROUND

There are strong associations between oxygen desaturations and cardiovascular outcomes. Additionally, oxygen resaturation rates are linked to excessive daytime sleepiness independent of oxygen desaturation severity. No studies have yet looked at the independent effects of comorbidities or medications on resaturation parameters.

METHODS

The Sleep Heart Health Study data was utilised to derive oxygen saturation parameters from 5804 participants. Participants with a history of comorbidities or medication usage were compared against healthy participants with no comorbidity/medication history.

RESULTS

4293 participants (50.4% female, median age 64 years) were included in the analysis. Females recorded significantly faster resaturation rates (mean 0.61%/s) than males (mean 0.57%/s, p < 0.001), regardless of comorbidities. After adjusting for demographics, sleep parameters, and desaturation parameters, resaturation rate was reduced with hypertension (-0.09 (95% CI -0.16, -0.03)), myocardial infarction (-0.13 (95% CI -0.21, -0.04)) and heart failure (-0.19 (95% CI -0.33, -0.05)), or when using anti-hypertensives (-0.10 (95% CI -0.17, -0.03)), mental health medications (-0.18 (95% CI -0.27, -0.08)) or anticoagulants (-0.41 (95% CI -0.56, -0.26)). Desaturation to Resaturation ratio for duration was decreased with mental health (-0.21 (95% CI -0.34, -0.08)) or diabetic medications (-0.24 (95% CI -0.41, -0.07)), and desaturation to resaturation ratio for area decreased with heart failure (-0.25 (95% CI -0.42, -0.08)).

CONCLUSIONS

Comorbidities and medications significantly affect nocturnal resaturation parameters, independent of desaturation parameters. However, the causal relationship remains unclear. Further research can enhance our knowledge and develop more precise and safer interventions for individuals affected by certain comorbidities.

Achieving Better Understanding of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Treatment Effects on Cardiovascular Disease Outcomes through Machine Learning Approaches: A Narrative Review

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) affects almost a billion people worldwide and is associated with a myriad of adverse health outcomes. Among the most prevalent and morbid are cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Nonetheless, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of OSA treatment have failed to show improvements in CVD outcomes. A major limitation in our field is the lack of precision in defining OSA and specifically subgroups with the potential to benefit from therapy. Further, this has called into question the validity of using the time-honored apnea-hypopnea index as the ultimate defining criteria for OSA. Recent applications of advanced statistical methods and machine learning have brought to light a variety of OSA endotypes and phenotypes. These methods also provide an opportunity to understand the interaction between OSA and comorbid diseases for better CVD risk stratification. Lastly, machine learning and specifically heterogeneous treatment effects modeling can help uncover subgroups with differential outcomes after treatment initiation. In an era of data sharing and big data, these techniques will be at the forefront of OSA research. Advanced data science methods, such as machine-learning analyses and artificial intelligence, will improve our ability to determine the unique influence of OSA on CVD outcomes and ultimately allow us to better determine precision medicine approaches in OSA patients for CVD risk reduction. In this narrative review, we will highlight how team science via machine learning and artificial intelligence applied to existing clinical data, polysomnography, proteomics, and imaging can do just that.

A systematic review of deep learning methods for modeling electrocardiograms during sleep

Sleep is one of the most important human physiological activities and plays an essential role in human health. Polysomnography (PSG) is the gold standard for measuring sleep quality and disorders, but it is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to errors. Current research has confirmed the correlations between sleep and the respiratory/circulatory system. Electrocardiography (ECG) is convenient to perform, and ECG data are rich in breathing information. Therefore, sleep research based on ECG data has become popular. Currently, deep learning (DL) methods have achieved promising results on predictive health care tasks using ECG signals. Therefore, in this review, we systematically identify recent research studies and analyze them from the perspectives of data, model, and task. We discuss the shortcomings, summarize the findings, and highlight the potential opportunities. For sleep-related tasks, many ECG-based DL methods produce more accurate results than traditional approaches by combining multiple signal features and model structures. Methods that are more interpretable, scalable, and transferable will become ubiquitous in the daily practice of medicine and ambient-assisted-living applications. This paper is the first systematic review of ECG-based DL methods for sleep tasks.

The Sleep Revolution project: the concept and objectives

Obstructive sleep apnea is linked to severe health consequences such as hypertension, daytime sleepiness, and cardiovascular disease. Nearly a billion people are estimated to have obstructive sleep apnea with a substantial economic burden. However, the current diagnostic parameter of obstructive sleep apnea, the apnea-hypopnea index, correlates poorly with related comorbidities and symptoms. Obstructive sleep apnea severity is measured by counting respiratory events, while other physiologically relevant consequences are ignored. Furthermore, as the clinical methods for analysing polysomnographic signals are outdated, laborious, and expensive, most patients with obstructive sleep apnea remain undiagnosed. Therefore, more personalised diagnostic approaches are urgently needed. The Sleep Revolution, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, aims to tackle these shortcomings by developing machine learning tools to better estimate obstructive sleep apnea severity and phenotypes. This allows for improved personalised treatment options, including increased patient participation. Also, implementing these tools will alleviate the costs and increase the availability of sleep studies by decreasing manual scoring labour. Finally, the project aims to design a digital platform that functions as a bridge between researchers, patients, and clinicians, with an electronic sleep diary, objective cognitive tests, and questionnaires in a mobile application. These ambitious goals will be achieved through extensive collaboration between 39 centres, including expertise from sleep medicine, computer science, and industry and by utilising tens of thousands of retrospectively and prospectively collected sleep recordings. With the commitment of the European Sleep Research Society and Assembly of National Sleep Societies, the Sleep Revolution has the unique possibility to create new standardised guidelines for sleep medicine.

Enhanced Recognition of Amputated Wrist and Hand Movements by Deep Learning Method Using Multimodal Fusion of Electromyography and Electroencephalography

Motion classification can be performed using biometric signals recorded by electroencephalography (EEG) or electromyography (EMG) with noninvasive surface electrodes for the control of prosthetic arms. However, current single-modal EEG and EMG based motion classification techniques are limited owing to the complexity and noise of EEG signals, and the electrode placement bias, and low-resolution of EMG signals. We herein propose a novel system of two-dimensional (2D) input image feature multimodal fusion based on an EEG/EMG-signal transfer learning (TL) paradigm for detection of hand movements in transforearm amputees. A feature extraction method in the frequency domain of the EEG and EMG signals was adopted to establish a 2D image. The input images were used for training on a model based on the convolutional neural network algorithm and TL, which requires 2D images as input data. For the purpose of data acquisition, five transforearm amputees and nine healthy controls were recruited. Compared with the conventional single-modal EEG signal trained models, the proposed multimodal fusion method significantly improved classification accuracy in both the control and patient groups. When the two signals were combined and used in the pretrained model for EEG TL, the classification accuracy increased by 4.18-4.35% in the control group, and by 2.51-3.00% in the patient group.

Application of machine learning analysis based on diffusion tensor imaging to identify REM sleep behavior disorder

PURPOSE

We evaluated the feasibility of machine learning analysis using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) parameters to identify patients with idiopathic rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (RBD). We hypothesized that patients with idiopathic RBD could be identified via machine learning analysis based on DTI.

METHODS

We enrolled 20 patients with newly diagnosed idiopathic RBD at a tertiary hospital. We also included 20 healthy subjects as a control group. All of the subjects underwent DTI. We obtained the conventional DTI parameters and structural connectomic profiles from the DTI. We investigated the differences in conventional DTI measures and structural connectomic profiles between patients with idiopathic RBD and healthy controls. We then used machine learning analysis using a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm to identify patients with idiopathic RBD using conventional DTI and structural connectomic profiles.

RESULTS

Several regions showed significant differences in conventional DTI measures and structural connectomic profiles between patients with idiopathic RBD and healthy controls. The SVM classifier based on conventional DTI measures revealed an accuracy of 87.5% and an area under the curve of 0.900 to identify patients with idiopathic RBD. Another SVM classifier based on structural connectomic profiles yielded an accuracy of 75.0% and an area under the curve of 0.833.

CONCLUSION

Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of machine learning analysis based on DTI to identify patients with idiopathic RBD. The conventional DTI parameters might be more important than the structural connectomic profiles in identifying patients with idiopathic RBD.

Obstructive sleep apnea prediction from electrocardiogram scalograms and spectrograms using convolutional neural networks

Objective.In this study, we conducted a comparative analysis of deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models in predicting obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) using electrocardiograms. Unlike other studies in the literature, this study automatically extracts time-frequency features by using CNNs instead of manual feature extraction from ECG recordings.Approach.The proposed model generates scalogram and spectrogram representations by transforming preprocessed 30 s ECG segments from time domain to the frequency domain using continuous wavelet transform and short time Fourier transform, respectively. We examined AlexNet, GoogleNet and ResNet18 models in predicting OSA events. The effect of transfer learning on success is also investigated. Based on the observed results, we proposed a new model that is found more effective in estimation. In total, 152 ECG recordings were included in the study for training and evaluation of the models.Main results.The prediction using scalograms immediately 30 s before potential OSA onsets gave the best performance with 82.30% accuracy, 83.22% sensitivity, 82.27% specificity and 82.95% positive predictive value. The prediction using spectrograms also achieved up to 80.13% accuracy and 81.99% sensitivity on prediction. Per-recording classification suggested considerable results with 91.93% accuracy for prediction of OSA events.Significance.Time-frequency deep features of scalograms and spectrograms of ECG segments prior to OSA events provided reliable information about the possible events in the future. The proposed CNN model can be used as a good indicator to accurately predict OSA events using ECG recordings.