Classification of sleep apnea types

The sleep apnea is the case in which breathing drops under 20% of the maximum amplitude of the breathing signal during at least 10 seconds while sleeping. The sleep apnea has 3 types named as ?central sleep apnea (CSA)?, ?obstructive sleep apnea (OSA)? and ?mixed sleep apnea (MSA)?. The golden standart used in the diagnosis of the disease is the polisomnographic review during the night.In this study, new methods that classify the apnea types during sleep identified with electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), photoplethismography (PPG) and classical respiratory parameters have been developed. In the first phase of study, CSA, OSA patients as well as healthy persons diagnosed by a specialist are classified in these three groups by analyzing EEG signals using coherence function (CF) and mutual information (MI) methods. In the second stage, ?apnea patients? and ?healthy persons? are classified into two groups with simultaneously obtained heart rate variability (HRV) from the ECG and PPG signals by analyzing cross power spectral density (CPSD) method. In the third stage, types of sleep apnea are classified as in the first phase of the study using the classic respiratory parameters, oro-nasal thermistor, thorax and abdomen-band signals with energy, variance and auto-correlation methods. In all phases of this studies, artificial neural networks (ANN) method is used for classification of data.As a result of this study, new methods that classify sleep apnea with a very low amount of error have been developed. These methods were developed as new decision support systems to help doctors in the diagnosis.