Bispectral Analysis to Enhance Oximetry as a Simplified Alternative for Pediatric Sleep Apnea Diagnosis

This study aims at assessing the bispectral analysis of blood oxygen saturation (SpO
₂
) from nocturnal oximetry to help in pediatric sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome (SAHS) diagnosis. Recent studies have found excessive redundancy in the SAHS-related information usually extracted from SpO
₂
, while proposing only two features as a reduced set to be used. On the other hand, it has been suggested that SpO
₂
bispectral analysis is able to provide complementary information to common anthropometric, spectral, and clinical variables. We address these novel findings to assess whether bispectrum provides new non-redundant information to help in SAHS diagnosis. Thus, we use 981 pediatric SpO
₂
recordings to extract both the reduced set of features recently proposed as well as 9 bispectral features. Then, a feature selection method based on the fast correlation-based filter and bootstrapping is used to assess redundancy among all the features. Finally, the non-redundant ones are used to train a Bayesian multi-layer perceptron neural network (BYMLP) that estimate the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), which is the diagnostic reference variable. Bispectral phase entropy was found complementary to the two previously recommended features and a BY-MLP model trained with the three of them reached high agreement with actual AHI (intra-class correlation coefficient = 0.889). Estimated AHI also showed high diagnostic ability, reaching 82.1%, 81.9%, and 90.3% accuracies and 0.814, 0.880, and 0.922 area under the receiver-operating characteristics curve for three common AHI thresholds: 1 e/h, 5 e/h, and 10 e/h, respectively. These results suggest that the information extracted from the bispectrum of SpO
₂
can improve the diagnostic performance of the oximetry test.