Automatic identification of respiratory events based on nasal airflow and respiratory effort of the chest and abdomen

Objective. Disease may cause changes in an individual’s respiratory pattern, which can be measured as parameters for disease evaluation, usually through manually annotated polysomnographic recordings. In this study, a machine learning model based on nasal airflow and respiratory effort of the chest and abdomen is proposed to automatically identify respiratory events, including normal breathing, hypopnea and apnea. Approach. The nasal airflow and chest–abdominal respiratory effort signals were collected by polysomnography (PSG). Time/frequency domain features, fractional Fourier transform features and sample entropy were calculated to obtain feature sets. Features selected through statistical analysis were used as input variables of the machine learning model. The performance of different input combinations on different models was studied and cross-validated. Main results. The dataset included PSG sleep records of 60 patients provided by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army General Hospital. The extreme gradient boosting-based model (XGBoost) performed best in several models with an accuracy of 0.807 and a F1 score of 0.807, depending on the combination of nasal airflow and two respiratory effort signals. The precision for normal breathing, hypopnea and apnea events were 0.764, 0.789 and 0.871, respectively. In addition, the recall scores were 0.833, 0.768 and 0.823 for normal breathing, hypopnea and apnea events, respectively. Moreover, it was found that the standard deviation and kurtosis of nasal airflow were the most important features of the respiratory event detection model. Significance. Since nasal airflow and respiratory effort of the chest and abdomen contain the characteristics of respiratory events, their combined use can improve the classification performance for identification of respiratory events. With this method, respiratory events can be automatically detected and labeled from the PSG records, which can be used to screen for patients with sleep apnea–hypopnea syndrome.