Diagnosis of Obstructive Sleep Apnea during Wakefulness Using Upper Airway Negative Pressure and Machine Learning

Background and Rational: Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a common disorder, affecting almost 10% of adults, but very underdiagnosed. This is largely due to limited access to overnight sleep testing using polysomnography (PSG). Our goal was to distinguish OSA from healthy individual using a simple maneuver during wakefulness in combination with machine learning methods. Methods: Participants have undergone an overnight PSG to determine their ground truth OSA severity. Separately, they were asked to breathe through a nasal mask or a mouth piece through which negative pressure (NP) was applied, during wakefulness. Airflow waveforms were acquired and several features were extracted and used to train various classifiers to predict OSA. Results and Discussion: The performance of each classifier and experimental setup was calculated. The best results were obtained using Random Forest classifier for distinguishing OSA from healthy individuals with a very good area under the curve of 0.80. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to deploy machine learning and NP with promising path to diagnose OSA during wakefulness.