Detection of sleep apnea in Af patients using holter recordings

Abstract

Sleep apnea (SA) is a highly prevalent sleep disorder. A common way to diagnose SA is overnight polysomnography (PSG), which is carried out in a specialized hospital-based sleep laboratory. On the other hand, there have been many reports of the diagnose method based on heart rate variability which has the information of respiration. In atrial fibrillation (Af) patients, however, it is difficult to extract the respiratory information because of the randomness of heart rate. In this study, the detection method of SA in Af patients using holter recordings has been developed. In proposed method, the respiratory signal is regarded as the disturbance to electrocardiogram (ECG) and extracted from estimation error of ECG which is estimated from another channel of ECG. The results indicate that the proposed method may be able to detect the event of SA in Af patients.