Automatically detecting OSAHS patients based on transfer learning and model fusion

Objective . Snoring is the most typical symptom of obstructive sleep apnea hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) that can be used to develop a non-invasive approach for automatically detecting OSAHS patients. Approach . In this work, a model based on transfer learning and model fusion was applied to classify simple snorers and OSAHS patients. Three kinds of basic models were constructed based on pretrained Visual Geometry Group-16 (VGG16), pretrained audio neural networks (PANN), and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC). The XGBoost was used to select features based on feature importance, the majority voting strategy was applied to fuse these basic models and leave-one-subject-out cross validation was used to evaluate the proposed model. Main results . The results show that the fused model embedded with top-5 VGG16 features, top-5 PANN features, and MFCC feature can correctly identify OSAHS patients (AHI > 5) with 100% accuracy. Significance . The proposed fused model provides a good classification performance with lower computational cost and higher robustness that makes detecting OSAHS patients at home possible.