Classifying Sleep Stages Automatically in Single-channel Against Multi-channel EEG: A Performance Analysis

The most important part of sleep quality assessment is the classification of sleep stages, which helps to diagnose sleep-related disease. In the traditional sleep staging method, subjects have to spend a night in the sleep clinic for recording polysomnogram. Sleep expert classifies the sleep stages by monitoring the signals, which is time consuming and frustrating task and can be affected by human error. New studies propose fully automated techniques for classifying sleep stages that makes sleep scoring possible at home. Despite comprehensive studies have been presented in this field the classification results have not yet reached the gold standard due to the concentration on the use of a limited source of information such as single channel EEG. Therefore, this article introduces a new method for fusing two sources of information, including electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrooculogram (EOG), to achieve promising results in the classification of sleep stages. In the proposed method, extracted features from the EEG and EOG signals, are divided into two feature sets consisting of the EEG features and fused features of EEG and EOG. Then, each feature set transformed into a horizontal visibility graph (HVG). The images of the HVG are produced in a novel framework and classified by proposed transfer learning convolutional neural network for data fusion (TLCNN-DF). Employing transfer learning at the training stage of the model has accelerated the training process of the CNN and improved the performance of the model. The proposed algorithm is used to classify the Sleep-EDF and Sleep-EDFx benchmark datasets. The algorithm can classify the Sleep-EDF dataset with an accuracy of 93.58% and Cohen’s kappa coefficient of 0.899. The results show proposed method can achieve superior performance compared to state-of-the-art studies on classification of sleep stages. Furthermore, it can attain reliable results as an alternative to conventional sleep staging.

Poor quality and poor duration of sleep have been associated with cognitive decline, diseases, and disorders. Therefore, sleep studies are imperative to recapitulate phenotypes associated with poor sleep quality and uncover mechanisms contributing to psychopathology. Classification of sleep stages, vigilance state bout durations, and number of transitions amongst vigilance states serves as a proxy for evaluating sleep quality in preclinical studies. Currently, the gold standard for sleep staging is expert human inspection of polysomnography (PSG) obtained from preclinical rodent models and this approach is immensely time consuming. To accelerate the analysis, we developed a deep-learning-based software tool for automated sleep stage classification in rats. This study aimed to develop an automated method for classifying three sleep stages in rats (REM/paradoxical sleep, NREM/slow-wave sleep, and wakefulness) using a deep learning approach based on single-channel EEG data. Single-channel EEG data were acquired from 16 rats, each undergoing two 24 h recording sessions. The data were labeled by human experts in 10 s epochs corresponding to three stages: REM/paradoxical sleep, NREM/slow-wave sleep, and wakefulness. A deep neural network (DNN) model was designed and trained to classify these stages using the raw temporal data from the EEG. The DNN achieved strong performance in predicting the three sleep stages, with an average F1 score of 87.6% over a cross-validated test set. The algorithm was able to predict key parameters of sleep architecture, including total bout duration, average bout duration, and number of bouts, with significant accuracy. Our deep learning model effectively automates the classification of sleep stages using single-channel EEG data in rats, reducing the need for labor-intensive manual annotation. This tool enables high-throughput sleep studies and may accelerate research into sleep-related pathologies. Furthermore, we provide over 700 h of expert-scored sleep data, available for public use in future research studies.

In this study, using the polysomnography data set, the classification of sleep stages was realized automatically with supervised learning method. In this study, sleep stage classification was carried out in three stages. In the first stage, the biomedical signal was divided into its independent components by Independent Component Analysis method. In the second stage, feature extraction was performed by using Mel Kepstrum Coefficient method. In the third stage, artificial neural networks were trained by using the extracted features and the sleep phases were estimated by using software architecture called Long ShortTerm Memory. As a result of the classification process performed in this way, the accuracy rate of the ten fold cross validation obtained for the binary classification (asleep / wake) was found to be 97,87%. For the five fold classification problem, the accuracy rate of the subject dependent algorithm and polysomnography data obtained using a single EEG channel was found to be 93,36% as a result of the ten-fold cross validation process.

Sleep stage classification is important to accurately predict and diagnose patients with sleep disorders. Though various deep learning approaches have been implemented to classify sleep classes, these consist limitations that impact the accuracy and processing time of the classification model. The aim of this research is to enhance the accuracy and minimize the training time of the deep learning classification model. The proposed system consists of One Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with enhanced loss function to improve the accuracy of scoring of five different sleep classes. Preprocessing, Feature Extraction and Classification are the main components of the proposed system. Initially, EEG signals are fed to an adaptive filter for preprocessing, in order to remove any noise in signal. Thereafter, feature is extracted through multiple convolutional and pooling layers, and finally the classification is done by fully connected layer using softmax activation with enhanced loss function. The proposed solution is tested on data samples from multiple datasets with five classes of Sleep classification. Based on the obtained results, the proposed solution has found to achieve an accuracy of 96.26% which is almost 4.2% higher than the state-of-the-art solution which is 92.76%. Furthermore, the processing time has been reduced by 11 milliseconds against the state-of-the-art solution. The proposed system focused on classifying sleep stages in five classes using EEG signals with deep learning approach. It enhances the loss function in order to minimize errors in the prediction of sleep classes and improves the accuracy of the model. Furthermore, the training speed of the model has also been reduced by applying batch normalization techniques inside the model. In the future, larger datasets of different sleep disorder patients with varying features can be used for training and implementing the proposed solution. The datasets can also be pre-processed using additional techniques to refine the data before feeding to the neural network model.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal is often used to assess sleep quality and treat sleep disorders. Many existing methods usually obtain high accuracy through a large number of feature preprocessing and feature extraction of EEG signals, which need a lot of prior knowledge as the basis. In this paper, a novel sleep stage classification framework, named FRL&S2SL, is proposed. The framework combines fast representation learning (FRL) and semantic-to-signal learning (S2SL) and uses single-channel EEG without any preprocessing of EEG signals. In the proposed framework, we utilize convolutional neural networks (CNN) to extract time-invariant features and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) models to extract temporal features. Furthermore, auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (ACGAN) is used to embed semantic features into signal features and to extract knowledge domain features of EEG signals for the first time. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), sleep is divided into five stages: awake, rapid eye movement (REM) and three non-rapid eye movement (N1/N2/N3). We evaluated our framework using single-channel EEG (Fpz-Oz) from Sleep-EDF dataset, which is subject to the standards specified by AASM. The results show that our framework has achieved state-of-the-art in many evaluation metrics.

Sleep stage classification plays a pivotal role in effective diagnosis and treatment of sleep related disorders. Traditionally, sleep scoring is done manually by trained sleep scorers. The analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals recorded during sleep by clinicians is tedious, time-consuming and prone to human errors. Therefore, it is clinically important to score sleep stages using machine learning techniques to get accurate diagnosis. Several studies have been proposed for automated detection of sleep stages. However, these studies have employed only healthy normal subjects (good sleepers). The proposed study focuses on the automated sleep-stage scoring of subjects suffering from seven different kind of sleep disorders such as insomnia, bruxism, narcolepsy, nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy (NFLE), periodic leg movement (PLM), rapid eye movement (REM) behavioural disorder and sleep-disordered breathing as well as normal subjects. The open source physionet’s cyclic alternating pattern (CAP) sleep database is used for this study. The EEG epochs are decomposed into sub-bands using a new class of optimized wavelet filters. Two EEG channels, namely F4-C4 and C4-A1, combined are used for this work as they can provide more insights into the changes in EEG signals during sleep. The norm features are computed from six sub-bands coefficients of optimal wavelet filter bank and fed to various supervised machine learning classifiers. We have obtained the highest classification performance using an ensemble of bagged tree (EBT) classifier with 10-fold cross validation. The CAP database comprising of 80 subjects is divided into ten different subsets and then ten different sleep-stage scoring tasks are performed. Since, the CAP database is unbalanced with different duration of sleep stages, the balanced dataset also has been created using over-sampling and under-sampling techniques. The highest average accuracy of 85.3% and Cohen’s Kappa coefficient of 0.786 and accuracy of 92.8% and Cohen’s Kappa coefficient of 0.915 are obtained for unbalanced and balanced databases, respectively. The proposed method can reliably classify the sleep stages using single or dual channel EEG epochs of 30 s duration instead of using multimodal polysomnography (PSG) which are generally used for sleep-stage scoring. Our developed automated system is ready to be tested with more sleep EEG data and can be employed in various sleep laboratories to evaluate the quality of sleep in various sleep disorder patients and normal subjects.

This paper presents a CNN-GRU deep learning model for classifying sleep stages. The Conventional sleep stage scoring method is a visual classification process, based on a set of biomedical signals such as Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Electrooculogram (EOG), where high human intervention is required. In this study, we proposed a deep neural network involving convolutional neural networks and gated recurrent units, to automatically extract the most appropriate features and sequence trends of PSG signals, without utilizing hand crafted features for scoring sleep stages. The proposed model, which uses multiple PSG channels, was evaluated using two data sets collected from 184 patients and 70 healthy subjects. The proposed multi-channel model showed 91.9 % of overall accuracy, while recall, precision, and f1 measures were approximately 92 % for patients. For healthy subjects, the multi-channel model showed 89.3 % overall classification accuracy. Recall, precision, and f1 measures showed approximately 89 %. The main model was adapted to utilize with a single EEG channel configuration, which yields 4 single-channel models for each data set. Therefore, the proposed model is capable of performing sleep stage classification using a single EEG channel without altering the model architecture.

An electroencephalogram (EEG) is the most dominant method for detecting epileptic seizures. However, the existing techniques use single-channel EEGs from public databases and the sample size is small. This study proposes a strategy to distinguish multichannel EEGs for health control, particularly the interictal and ictal multichannel EEGs of epileptic patients. We calculated five features (variance, Pearson correlation coefficient, Hoeffding's D measure, Shannon entropy, inter-quartile range), which are based on maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform. These features were then fed into linear discriminant analysis for classification purposes. Finally, the proposed method was tested on data on 34 healthy people, 21 interictal patients and 30 ictal patients taken from a hospital. Our experimental results show that the accuracy between healthy and epileptic seizures was 96.88% and the area under the curve (AUC) is 1. The accuracy between interictal and epileptic seizures was 94.12% and the AUC was 0.97. We also obtained an accuracy and AUC equal to 1 for discrimination of interictal EEGs from normal. Finally, we obtained an AUC of 0.83 and an accuracy of 85.88% for discrimination in these three classes. Therefore, our study achieves sufficient performance. Our proposed method can serve as an auxiliary tool for clinicians who wish to make clinical decisions and reduces the burden of detecting epileptic seizures.

Automatic sleep staging with a single-channel EEG based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition

Automatic sleep stage monitoring is an essential tool for the diagnosis and treatment of sleep-related disorders effectively. Although extensive studies focusing on single source data or information, such as single channel electroencephalogram (EEG), electrooculogram (EOG), and electromyogram (EMG), with machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) have been presented in this field of automatic sleep staging, there are very limited literature's that have investigated the impact of multisource information fusion on ML or DL based schemes for the sleep stage classification. In addition, exploiting recurrent neural network (RNN) to learn temporal information from the sequences of multi-source inputs can bring significant improvement in classifying the sleep stage. Therefore, we aim to develop an multi-source data fusion, more specifically two source's signal fusion, enabled end-to-end convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) in order to perform automatic sleep stage classification in this article. In the proposed scheme, no hand crafted features is used to train the model and hence the proposed model can be called an end-to-end approach. The proposed CRNN model can extract time-invariant features from raw data of two input sources and can fuse them to learn temporally correlated features. Sleep-EDF expanded benchmark dataset is used in this study and we have employed Fpz-Cz EEG channel signal and EOG signal as input with 3 variants of RNN layer in model architecture separately in order to evaluate and investigate the performance. The proposed CRNN model with standard RNN layers can classify the Sleep-EDF dataset with maximum average accuracy of 90.30% and maximum Cohen's kappa coefficient of 86.86 compared other two RNN variant's layer (e.g., gated recurrent unit and long short term memory) based models which is very promising in the studies on classification of sleep stages as well as can be regarded as an alternative to conventional sleep staging.

In the pursuit of highly effective and efficient portable sleep classification systems, researchers have been testing a massive number of combinations of EEG features and classifiers. State of art sleep classification ensembles achieve accuracy in the order of 90%. However, there is presently no consensus regarding the best setof features for sleep staging with single channel EEG, leading researchers to modify feature selection according to the number of classification stages. This paper introduces a reduced set of frequency-domain features capable of yielding high classification accuracy (90.9%, 91.8%, 92.4%, 94.3% and 97.1%) for all 6- to 2-state sleep stages. The proposed system uses fast Fourier transform (FFT) to convert data from Pz-Oz EEG channel into the frequency domain. Afterwards, eight statistical features are extracted from specific frequency ranges and fed into a random forest classifier.

Prototype-based methods in deep learning offer interpretable explanations for decisions by comparing inputs to typical representatives in the data. This study explores the adaptation of SESM, a self-attention-based prototype method successful in electrocardiogram (ECG) tasks, for electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. The architecture is evaluated on sleep stage classification, exploring its efficacy in predicting stages with single-channel EEG. The model achieves comparable test accuracy compared to EEGNet, a state-of-the-art black-box architecture for EEG classification. The generated prototypical components are exaimed qualitatively and using the area over the perterbation curve (AOPC) indicate some alignment with expected bio-markers for different sleep stages such as alpha spindles and slow waves in non-REM sleep, but the results are severely limited by the model’s ability to only extract and present information in the time-domain. Ablation studies are used to explore the impact of kernel size, number of heads, and diversity threshold on model performance and explainability. This study represents the first application of a self-attention based prototype method to EEG data and provides a step forward in explainable AI for EEG data analysis.

Sleep stage classification can be used to monitor sleep quality and diagnose sleep disorders. Sleep disorders can be correlated to health conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. This project uses a hydraulic bed sensor positioned under the mattress, as well as a deep learning approach, for sleep stage classification. Our motivation is to provide an automatic, non-invasive and more accessible method of classifying sleep stages by using deep learning to analyze data gathered from the hydraulic bed sensor. The test subjects for this project were elderly patients with sleep disorders. Polysomnography (PSG) data, the current gold standard, was also collected in a Sleep Lab to serve as the ground truth for the bed sensor data. In this study, sleep stages are categorized into 3 categories: Wake, Rapid Eye Movement (REM), and Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM). This paper uses a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) hybrid model with 2 CNNs of different filter sizes for feature extraction. These features are then fed into the LSTM for classification. Our results show an average accuracy of about 76% using the leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) validation. These results are promising and show that the hydraulic bed sensor combined with a deep learning approach is capable of providing an automatic and non-invasive method of classifying sleep stages.

A comprehensive evaluation of contemporary methods used for automatic sleep staging

The automatic sleep stage classification technique can facilitate the diagnosis of sleep disorders and release the medical expert from labor-consumption work. In this paper, novel improved model based essence features (IMBEFs) were proposed combining locality energy (LE) and dual state space models (DSSMs) for automatic sleep stage detection on single-channel electroencephalograph (EEG) signals. Firstly, each EEG epoch is decomposed into low-level sub-bands (LSBs) and high-level sub-bands (HSBs) by wavelet packet decomposition (WPD), separately. Then, the DSSMs are estimated by the LSBs and the LE calculation is carried out on HSBs. Thirdly, the IMBEFs extracted from the DSSM and LE are fed into the appropriate classifier for sleep stage classification. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated on three public sleep databases. The experimental results show that under the Rechtschaffen’s and Kale’s (R&K) standard, the sleep stage classification accuracies of six classes on the Sleep EDF database and the Dreams Subjects database are 92.04% and 78.92%, respectively. Under the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) standard, the classification accuracies of five classes in the Dreams Subjects database and the ISRUC database reached 79.90% and 81.65%. The proposed method can be used for reliable sleep stage classification with high accuracy compared with state-of-the-art methods.