Abstract
Introduction
Sleep staging of polysomnography (PSG) is a time-consuming task, it requires significant training, and significant variability among scorers is expected. A new software (MEBsleep by Medibio Limited) was developed to automatically perform sleep scoring based on machine learning algorithms. This study aimed to perform an extensive investigation of its agreement with expert sleep technicians.
Methods
Forty polysomnography recordings of patients that were referred for sleep evaluation to three sleep clinics were retrospectively collected. Three experienced technicians independently staged the recording complying with the scoring rules of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine guidelines. Positive Percent Agreement (PPA), Positive Predictive Value (PPV), and other agreement statistics between the automatic and manual staging, among the staging performed by the three technicians, and their differences were calculated. Bootstrap resampling was used to calculate 95% confidence intervals and statistical significance of the differences.
Results
Automatic staging took less than two minutes per PSG on a consumer laptop. The automatic staging resulted for the most comparable (PPA difference of N1, N3, and REM; PPV difference of N1, N2, N3, and REM) or statistically significantly more in agreement with the technicians’ staging than the between-technician agreement (PPA difference of N2: 3.90%, 95% bootstrap CI 1.79%-6.01%; PPV difference of Wake: 1.16%, 95% bootstrap CI 0.64%/1.67%), with the sole exception of a partial reduction in the positive percent agreement of the Wake stage (PPA difference of Wake -7.04%, 95% bootstrap CI -10.40%/-3.85%). The automatic staging also demonstrated very high accuracy in an indirect comparison with other similar software.
Conclusion
Given these promising results, the use of this software may support sleep clinicians by improving efficiency in sleep scoring.
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