Abstract
Background and Objective: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a fatal widespread sleep-related breathing disorder and a major risk factor for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, significantly impacting older adults’ health worldwide. Due to the risk of such complications, timely and accurate identification of OSA is crucial. Polysomnography is considered the most accurate technique for detecting OSA; however, it is limited by its complexity and multi-channel requirements. A promising alternative is electrocardiogram (ECG)-based diagnosis, which continuously monitors heart rhythm and captures subtle cardiac changes associated with OSA. Nevertheless, existing ECG-based approaches still face challenges related to complex feature engineering, limited capture of complementary temporal–spectral information and global dependencies, along with inadequate feature recalibration and fusion, which can restrict OSA detection. Thus, further improvements are still required to achieve clinically reliable performance. Methods: To address these challenges, this study proposes SApneaNet, a novel advanced deep learning method for detecting OSA events using ECG signals. The proposed approach employs the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) to convert ECG signals into RGB log-scalograms, enabling the simultaneous analysis of temporal and frequency-domain features. The generated RGB log-scalograms are then fed into a deep CNN encoder with adaptive squeeze-and-excitation (ASE), followed by a transformer and an adaptive gated feature fusion (AGFF) architecture. In this framework, to improve OSA detection performance, the CNN extracts rich local features, the ASE module performs channel-wise recalibration to enhance feature representations, the transformer performs data-parallel processing and captures global contextual dependencies, and the AGFF mechanism adaptively emphasizes informative features while suppressing less relevant ones. Results: The experimental results on the Apnea-ECG dataset showed that the model achieved a sensitivity of 94.7%, specificity of 95.2%, F1-score of 93.5%, accuracy of 95.1%, Cohen’s kappa of 89.4%, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) of 0.989 for per-segment classification. Furthermore, for per-recording classification, the model achieved an accuracy of 100.0%, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.025, and a Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.992. Overall, the experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model achieved excellent and competitive performance compared with other advanced state-of-the-art methods for OSA classification. Conclusions: The proposed model demonstrates strong efficacy in OSA detection, providing a novel and robust alternative to conventional diagnostic methods. The model’s reliable and consistent diagnostic performance highlights its potential for integration into practical OSA diagnostic systems, including home-based health monitoring devices and clinical decision-support tools.