ECGAN-Assisted ResT-Net Based on Fuzziness for OSA Detection

OBJECTIVE: Growing attention has been paid recently to electrocardiogram (ECG) based obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) detection, with some progresses been made on this topic. However, the lack of data, low data quality, and incomplete data labeling hinder the application of deep learning to OSA detection, which in turn affects the overall generalization capacity of the network. METHODS: To address these issues, we propose the ResT-ECGAN framework. It uses a one-dimensional generative adversarial network (ECGAN) for sample generation, and integrates it into ResT-Net for OSA detection. ECGAN filters the generated ECG signals by incorporating the concept of fuzziness, effectively increasing the amount of high-quality data. ResT-Net not only alleviates the problems caused by deepening the network but also utilizes multi-head attention mechanisms to parallelize sequence processing and extract more valuable OSA detection features by leveraging contextual information. RESULTS: Through extensive experiments, we verify that ECGAN can effectively improve the OSA detection performance of ResT-Net. Using only ResT-Net for detection, the accuracy on the Apnea-ECG and private databases is 0.885 and 0.837, respectively. By adding ECGAN-generated data augmentation, the accuracy is increased to 0.893 and 0.848, respectively. CONCLUSION AND SIGNIFICANCE: Comparing with the state-of-the-art deep learning methods, our method outperforms them in terms of accuracy. This study provides a new approach and solution to improve OSA detection in situations with limited labeled samples.