Construction and evaluation of a predictive model for the types of sleep respiratory events in patients with OSA based on hypoxic parameters

To explore the differences and associations of hypoxic parameters among distinct types of respiratory events in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and to construct prediction models for the types of respiratory events based on hypoxic parameters.

A retrospective analysis was conducted on a cohort of 67 patients with polysomnography (PSG). All overnight recorded respiratory events with pulse oxygen saturation (SpO₂) desaturation were categorized into four categories: hypopnea (Hyp, 3409 events), obstructive apnea (OA, 5561 events), central apnea (CA, 1110 events) and mixed apnea (MA, 1372 events). All event recordings were exported separately from the PSG software as comma-separated variable (.csv) files, which were imported into custom-built MATLAB software for analysis. Based on 13 hypoxic parameters, artificial neural network (ANN) and binary logistic regression (BLR) were separately used for construction of Hyp, OA, CA and MA models. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were employed to compare the various predictive indicators of the two models for different respiratory event types, respectively.

Both ANN and BLR models suggested that 13 hypoxic parameters significantly influenced the classification of respiratory event types; The area under the ROC curves of the ANN models surpassed those of traditional BLR models respiratory event types.

The ANN models constructed based on the 13 hypoxic parameters exhibited superior predictive capabilities for distinct types of respiratory events, providing a feasible new tool for automatic identification of respiratory event types using sleep SpO₂.