Automatic EEG Arousals Detection for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome

EEG arousals are seen in EEG records as awakening response of human brain. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is one of serious sleep disorders. Sevier OSA brings about EEG arousals and sleep of patients with OSAS is frequently interrupted. Number of respiratory-related arousals during the whole night PSG recordings is directly concerned with the quality of patients’ sleep. Therefore, to detect EEG arousals in PSG record is significant task for clinical diagnosis. In this paper, the method for automatic detection of EEG arousals was proposed. In order to detected respiratory-related arousals effectively, threshold values were determined according to the pathological events as sleep apnea and EMG. If the resumption of ventilation (end of apnea) was detected, lower thresholds were adopted for detecting EEG arousals including relatively doubtful arousals. On the other hand, threshold maintains high when the pathological events were not detected. Proposed method was applied to the data of eight patients with OSAS, and accuracy of EEG arousals detection was verified by comparing the visual inspection. Effectiveness of the proposed method in clinical diagnosis was investigated.