Many works in recent years have been focused on developing a portable and less expensive system for diagnosing patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), instead of using the inconvenient and expensive polysomnography (PSG). This study proposes a sleep apnea detection system based on a one-dimensional (1D) deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model using the single-lead 1D electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The proposed CNN model consists of 10 identical CNN-based feature extraction layers, a flattened layer, 4 identical classification layers mainly composed of fully connected networks, and a softmax classification layer. Thirty-five released and thirty-five withheld ECG recordings from the MIT PhysioNet Apnea-ECG Database were applied to train the proposed CNN model and validate its accuracy for the detection of the apnea events. The results show that the proposed model achieves 87.9% accuracy, 92.0% specificity, and 81.1% sensitivity for per-minute apnea detection, and 97.1% accuracy, 100% specificity, and 95.7% sensitivity for per-recording classification. The proposed model improves the accuracy of sleep apnea detection in comparison with several feature-engineering-based and feature-learning-based approaches.

This study developed an automatic heartbeat classification system for identifying normal beats, supraventricular ectopic beats, and ventricular ectopic beats based on normalized RR intervals and morphological features. The proposed heartbeat classification system consists of signal preprocessing, feature extraction, and linear discriminant classification. First, the signal preprocessing removed the high‐frequency noise and baseline drift of the original ECG signal. Then the feature extraction derived the normalized RR intervals and two types of morphological features using wavelet analysis and linear prediction modeling. Finally, the linear discriminant classifier combined the extracted features to classify heartbeats. A total of 99,827 heartbeats obtained from the MIT‐BIH Arrhythmia Database were divided into three datasets for the training and testing of the optimized heartbeat classification system. The study results demonstrate that the use of the normalized RR interval features greatly improves the positive predictive accuracy of identifying the normal heartbeats and the sensitivity for identifying the supraventricular ectopic heartbeats in comparison with the use of the nonnormalized RR interval features. In addition, the combination of the wavelet and linear prediction morphological features has higher global performance than only using the wavelet features or the linear prediction features.

Accurate QRS detection is an important first step for almost all automatic electrocardiogram (ECG) analyzing systems. However, QRS detection is difficult, not only because of the wide variety of ECG waveforms but also because of the interferences caused by various types of noise. This study proposes an improved QRS complex detection algorithm based on a four-level biorthogonal spline wavelet transform. A noise evaluation method is proposed to quantify the noise amount and to select a lower-noise wavelet detail signal instead of removing high-frequency components in the preprocessing stage. The QRS peaks can be detected by the extremum pairs in the selected wavelet detail signal and the proposed decision rules. The results show the high accuracy of the proposed algorithm, which achieves a 0.25% detection error rate, 99.84% sensitivity, and 99.92% positive prediction value, evaluated using the MIT-BIT arrhythmia database. The proposed algorithm improves the accuracy of QRS detection in comparison with several wavelet-based and non-wavelet-based approaches.

A variety of feature extraction and classification approaches have been proposed using electrocardiogram (ECG) and ECG-derived signals for improving the performance of detecting apnea events and diagnosing patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). The purpose of this study is to further evaluate whether the reduction of lower frequency P and T waves can increase the accuracy of the detection of apnea events. This study proposed filter bank decomposition to decompose the ECG signal into 15 subband signals, and a one-dimensional (1D) convolutional neural network (CNN) model independently cooperating with each subband to extract and classify the features of the given subband signal. One-minute ECG signals obtained from the MIT PhysioNet Apnea-ECG database were used to train the CNN models and test the accuracy of detecting apnea events for different subbands. The results show that the use of the newly selected subject-independent datasets can avoid the overestimation of the accuracy of the apnea event detection and can test the difference in the accuracy of different subbands. The frequency band of 31.25–37.5 Hz can achieve 100% per-recording accuracy with 85.8% per-minute accuracy using the newly selected subject-independent datasets and is recommended as a promising subband of ECG signals that can cooperate with the proposed 1D CNN model for the diagnosis of OSA.