Automatic Apnea Identification by Transformation of the Cepstral Domain

A new approach based on the transformation of the Cepstral domain is developed on this work. This approach reaches an automatic diagnosis for the syndrome of obstructive sleep apnea that includes a specific block for the removal of electrocardiogram (ECG) artifacts and the R wave detection. The system is modeled by a transformation of the Cepstral domain sequence using hidden Markov model (HMM). The final decision is done with two different approaches: one based on HMM as a classifier and a second one based on support vector machines classification and a parameterization based on the transformation of HMM by a kernel. The later approach reached results up to 99.23 %, using all test samples from Physionet Apnea-ECG Database.