Sleep apnea detection from single-lead electrocardiogram signals using effective deep-shallow fusion network

Objective. Explore a network architecture that can efficiently perform single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) sleep apnea (SA) detection by utilizing the beneficial information of extended ECG segments and reducing the impact of their noisy information. Approach. We propose an effective deep-shallow fusion network (EDSFnet). The deeper residual network is used to extract high-level features with stronger semantics and less noise from the original ECG segments. The shallower convolutional neural network is used to extract lower-level features with higher resolution containing more detailed neighborhood information from the extended ECG segments. These two types of features are then fused using Effective Channel Attention, implementing automatic weight assignment to take advantage of their complementary nature. Main results. The performance of EDSFnet is evaluated on the Apnea-ECG dataset and the FAH-ECG dataset. In the Apnea-ECG dataset with 35 subjects as the training set and 35 subjects as the test set, the accuracy of EDSFnet was 92.6% and 100% for per-segment and per-recording test, respectively. In the FAH-ECG dataset with 348 subjects as the training set and 88 subjects as the test set, the accuracy of EDSFnet was 89.0% and 93.2% for per-segment and per-recording test, respectively. EDSFnet has achieved state-of-the-art results in both experiments using the publicly available Apnea-ECG dataset and subject-independent experiments using the FAH-ECG clinical dataset. Significance. The success of EDSFnet in handling SA detection underlines its robustness and adaptability. By achieving superior results across different datasets, EDSFnet offers promise in advancing the cost-effective and efficient detection of SA through single-lead ECG, reducing the burden on patients and healthcare systems alike.