Chin Electromyogram, an Effectual and Useful Biosignal for the Diagnosis of Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is among the critical sleep disorders, and researchers have been investigating its novel diagnostic methods. Polysomnography signals' complexity, difficult visual interpretation, and the need for an efficient algorithm based on simpler signals have made the study of sleep apnea a compelling issue. In this study, the accuracy of chin electromyogram in the diagnosis of OSA was evaluated.

The amplitude variation and power spectral density (PSD) of chin electromyograms of 100 patients during apnea and before-after apnea occurrences (non-apnea) periods were compared after complete processing of the raw signal. Two-dimensional (2D) spectrograms related to the specified periods were extracted and fed into the residual neural network (ResNet). The network performance was reported by model evaluation parameters.

The results showed that OSA event influences the patient's chin muscle and increases the amplitude variances and power spectrum of the chin electromyogram. The ResNet-50 deep model classified the dataset of this sleep disorder with about 97% accuracy, which was higher than previous studies in this field.

Chin electromyogram can be introduced as a practical and useful biosignal for accurate OSA diagnosis with a deep classifier without the need for current specialized equipment and multiple vital signals.