Analysis of relation of attention control and mental fatigue with apnea hypopnea index in obstructive sleep apnea patients

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is one of the most widespread breathing-based sleep disorders. Daytime sleepiness and mental fatigue are among the common symptoms that are reported by OSA patients. Previous studies reported cognitive decline in patients with OSA. The diagnosis of OSA is done with laborious overnight polysomnography (PSG) recording. The aim of this thesis is to classify OSA patients according to their Apnea – Hypopnea Index (AHI) and Epworth scores using electroencephalography (EEG) signals that recorded during resting-state and selective-attention-test sessions. For this aim, 25 patients participated to resting-state and selective-attention-test sessions, which lasted 13 minutes in total, following their PSG recordings. Statistical analyses were conducted to detect important features from the EEG signals. Statistically significant features were used as input to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The results show that the EEG features that differed between sessions could classify the disease severity and symptoms with a 79.98% success rate on average. A decision support system that may help doctors to diagnose the disease severity was developed with ANNs.