title: Screening of obstructive sleep apnea with empirical mode decomposition of pulse oximetry.
abstract: Detection of desaturations on the pulse oximetry signal is of great importance for the diagnosis of sleep apneas. Using the counting of desaturations, an index can be built to help in the diagnosis of severe cases of obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome. It is important to have automatic detection methods that allows the screening for this syndrome, reducing the need of the expensive polysomnography based studies. In this paper a novel recognition method based on the empirical mode decomposition of the pulse oximetry signal is proposed. The desaturations produce a very specific wave pattern that is extracted in the modes of the decomposition. Using this information, a detector based on properly selected thresholds and a set of simple rules is built. The oxygen desaturation index constructed from these detections produces a detector for obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome with high sensitivity (0.838) and specificity (0.855) and yields better results than standard desaturation detection approaches.
authors.affiliation: Lab. of Signals and Nonlinear Dynamics, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos, Argentina; National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina. Electronic address: gschlotthauer@conicet.gov.ar.
authors.forename: Gastón
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Schlotthauer
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Signals, Systems and Computational Intelligence (sinc(i)), Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina; National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina.
authors.forename: Leandro E
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Di Persia
authors.affiliation: Centro de Medicina Respiratoria, Paraná, Argentina.
authors.forename: Luis D
authors.initials: LD
authors.lastname: Larrateguy
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Signals, Systems and Computational Intelligence (sinc(i)), Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina; National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina.
authors.forename: Diego H
authors.initials: DH
authors.lastname: Milone
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D016208:Databases, Factual; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; D006801:Humans; D010092:Oximetry / Q000379:methods*; D010100:Oxygen / Q000378:metabolism; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods; D012372:ROC Curve; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D020181:Sleep Apnea, Obstructive / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology
chemical_list: D010100:Oxygen
keywords: Empirical mode decomposition; Pulse oximetry; Sleep apnea