Order matters: sleep spindles contribute to memory consolidation only when followed by rapid-eye-movement sleep

Sleep is known to benefit memory consolidation, but little is known about the contribution of sleep stages within the sleep cycle. The sequential hypothesis proposes that memories are first replayed during non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM or N) sleep and then integrated into existing networks during rapid-eye-movement (REM or R) sleep, two successive critical steps for memory consolidation. However, it lacks experimental evidence as N always precedes R sleep in physiological conditions. We tested this sequential hypothesis in patients with central hypersomnolence disorder, including patients with narcolepsy who present the unique, anti-physiological peculiarity of frequently falling asleep in R sleep before entering N sleep. Patients performed a visual perceptual learning task before and after daytime naps stopped after one sleep cycle, starting in N or R sleep and followed by the other stage (i.e. N-R vs. R-N sleep sequence). We compared over-nap changes in performance, reflecting memory consolidation, depending on the sleep sequence during the nap. Thirty-six patients who slept for a total of 67 naps were included in the analysis. Results show that sleep spindles are associated with memory consolidation only when N is followed by R sleep, that is in physiologically ordered N-R naps, thus providing support to the sequential hypothesis in humans. In addition, we found a negative effect of rapid-eye-movements in R sleep on perceptual consolidation, highlighting the complex role of sleep stages in the balance to remember and to forget.

Light Sleep Detection based on Surface Electromyography Signals for Nap Monitoring

This paper proposes the development of automatic sleep stage detection by using physiological signals. We aim to develop an application to assist drivers after drowsiness or fatigue detection by a commercial driver vigilance system. The proposed method used a low-cost surface electromyography (EMG) device for sleep stage detection. We investigate skeletal muscle location and EMG features from sleep stage 2 to provide an EMG-based nap monitoring system. The results showed that using only one channel of a bipolar EMG signal from an upper trapezius muscle with median power frequency can achieve 84% accuracy. We implement a MyoWare muscle sensor into the proposed nap monitoring device. The results showed that the proposed system is feasible for detecting sleep stages and waking up the napper. A combination of EMG and electroencephalogram (EEG) signals might be yield a high system performance for nap monitoring and alarm system. We will prototype a portable device to connect the application to a smartphone and test with a target group, such as truck drivers and physicians.

Region-specific complexity of the intracranial EEG in the sleeping human brain

As the brain is a complex system with occurrence of self-similarity at different levels, a dedicated analysis of the complexity of brain signals is of interest to elucidate the functional role of various brain regions across the various stages of vigilance. We exploited intracranial electroencephalogram data from 38 cortical regions using the Higuchi fractal dimension (HFD) as measure to assess brain complexity, on a dataset of 1772 electrode locations. HFD values depended on sleep stage and topography. HFD increased with higher levels of vigilance, being highest during wakefulness in the frontal lobe. HFD did not change from wake to stage N2 in temporo-occipital regions. The transverse temporal gyrus was the only area in which the HFD did not differ between any two vigilance stages. Interestingly, HFD of wakefulness and stage R were different mainly in the precentral gyrus, possibly reflecting motor inhibition in stage R. The fusiform and parahippocampal gyri were the only areas showing no difference between wakefulness and N2. Stages R and N2 were similar only for the postcentral gyrus. Topographical analysis of brain complexity revealed that sleep stages are clearly differentiated in fronto-central brain regions, but that temporo-occipital regions sleep differently.

Modulation of Sleep Architecture by Whole-Body Static Magnetic Exposure: A Study Based on EEG-Based Automatic Sleep Staging

A steady increase in sleep problems has been observed along with the development of society. Overnight exposure to a static magnetic field has been found to improve sleep quality; however, such studies were mainly based on subjective evaluation. Thus, the presented data cannot be used to infer sleep architecture in detail. In this study, the subjects slept on a magneto-static mattress for four nights, and self-reported scales and electroencephalogram (EEG) were used to determine the effect of static magnetic field exposure (SMFE) on sleep. Machine learning operators, i.e., decision tree and supporting vector machine, were trained and optimized with the open access sleep EEG dataset to automatically discriminate the individual sleep stages, determined experimentally. SMEF was found to decrease light sleep duration (N2%) by 3.51%, and sleep onset latency (SOL) by 15.83%, while it increased deep sleep duration (N3%) by 8.43%, compared with the sham SMFE group. Further, the overall sleep efficiency (SE) was also enhanced by SMFE. It is the first study, to the best of our knowledge, where the change in sleep architecture was explored by SMFE. Our findings will be useful in developing a non-invasive sleep-facilitating instrument.

Sleep-Dependent Anomalous Cortical Information Interaction in Patients With Depression

Depression is a prevalent mental illness with high morbidity and is considered the main cause of disability worldwide. Brain activity while sleeping is reported to be affected by such mental illness. To explore the change of cortical information flow during sleep in depressed patients, a delay symbolic phase transfer entropy of scalp electroencephalography signals was used to measure effective connectivity between cortical regions in various frequency bands and sleep stages. The patient group and the control group shared similar patterns of information flow between channels during sleep. Obvious information flows to the left hemisphere and to the anterior cortex were found. Moreover, the occiput tended to be the information driver, whereas the frontal regions played the role of the receiver, and the right hemispheric regions showed a stronger information drive than the left ones. Compared with healthy controls, such directional tendencies in information flow and the definiteness of role division in cortical regions were both weakened in patients in most frequency bands and sleep stages, but the beta band during the N1 stage was an exception. The computable sleep-dependent cortical interaction may provide clues to characterize cortical abnormalities in depressed patients and should be helpful for the diagnosis of depression.

SCL-SSC: Supervised Contrastive Learning for Sleep Stage Classification

<div>In this study, we have proposed SCL-SSC(Supervised Contrastive Learning for Sleep Stage Classification), a deep learning-based framework for sleep stage classification which performs the task in two stages, 1) feature representation learning, and 2) classification. The feature learner is trained separately to represent the raw EEG signals in the feature space such that the distance between the embedding of EEG signals of the same sleep stage has less than the distance between the embedding of EEG signals of different sleep stages in the euclidean space. On top of feature learners, we have trained the classifier to perform the classification task. The distribution of sleep stages is not uniform in the PSG data, wake(W) and N2 sleep stages appear more frequently than the other sleep stages, which leads to an imbalance dataset problem. This paper addresses this issue by using weighted softmax cross-entropy loss function and also dataset oversampling technique utilized to produce synthetic data points for minority sleep stages for approximately balancing the number of sleep stages in the training dataset. The performance of our proposed model is evaluated on the publicly available Physionet datasets EDF-Sleep 2013 and 2018 versions. We have trained and evaluated our model on two EEG channels (Fpz-Cz and Pz-Oz) on these datasets separately. The evaluation result shows that the performance of SCL-SSC is the best annotation performance compared to the existing state-of art deep learning algorithms to our best of knowledge, with an overall accuracy of 94.1071% with a macro F1 score of 92.6416 and Cohen’s Kappa coefficient(κ) 0.9197. Our ablation studies on SCL-SSC shows that both triplet loss based pre-training of feature learner and oversampling of minority classes are contributing to better performance of the model(SCL-SSC).</div>

SCL-SSC: Supervised Contrastive Learning for Sleep Stage Classification

<div>In this study, we have proposed SCL-SSC(Supervised Contrastive Learning for Sleep Stage Classification), a deep learning-based framework for sleep stage classification which performs the task in two stages, 1) feature representation learning, and 2) classification. The feature learner is trained separately to represent the raw EEG signals in the feature space such that the distance between the embedding of EEG signals of the same sleep stage has less than the distance between the embedding of EEG signals of different sleep stages in the euclidean space. On top of feature learners, we have trained the classifier to perform the classification task. The distribution of sleep stages is not uniform in the PSG data, wake(W) and N2 sleep stages appear more frequently than the other sleep stages, which leads to an imbalance dataset problem. This paper addresses this issue by using weighted softmax cross-entropy loss function and also dataset oversampling technique utilized to produce synthetic data points for minority sleep stages for approximately balancing the number of sleep stages in the training dataset. The performance of our proposed model is evaluated on the publicly available Physionet datasets EDF-Sleep 2013 and 2018 versions. We have trained and evaluated our model on two EEG channels (Fpz-Cz and Pz-Oz) on these datasets separately. The evaluation result shows that the performance of SCL-SSC is the best annotation performance compared to the existing state-of art deep learning algorithms to our best of knowledge, with an overall accuracy of 94.1071% with a macro F1 score of 92.6416 and Cohen’s Kappa coefficient(κ) 0.9197. Our ablation studies on SCL-SSC shows that both triplet loss based pre-training of feature learner and oversampling of minority classes are contributing to better performance of the model(SCL-SSC).</div>

Sleep Stage Classification For Medical Purposes: Machine Learning Evaluation For Imbalanced Data

Background: Sleep is commonly associated with physical and mental health status. Sleep quality can be determined from the dynamic of sleep stages during the night. Data from the wearable device can potentially be used as predictors to classify the sleep stage. Robust Machine Learning (ML) model is needed to learn the pattern within wearable data to be associated with the sleep-wake classification, especially to handle the imbalanced proportion between wake and sleep stages. In this study, we incorporated a publicy available dataset consists of three features captured from a consumer wearable device and the labelled sleep stages from a polysomnogram. We implemented Random Forest, Support Vector Machine , Extreme Gradiet Boosting Tree, Densed Neural Network (DNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), complemented by three strategies to handle the imbalanced data problem. Results: In total, we included more than 24,815 rows of preprocessed data from 31 samples. The proportion of minority-majority data is 1:10. In classifying this extreme imbalanced data, the DNN model was found to have the best performance compared to the previous best model, which is based on basic Multi-Layer Perceptron. Our best model successfully achieved a 12% higher specificity score (prediction score for minority class) and 1% improvement on the sensitivity score (prediction score for majority class) by including all features in the model. This achievement was affected by the implementation of custom class weight and oversampling strategy. In contrast, when we only used two features, XGB achieved a specificity improvement only by 1%, while keeping the sensitivity at the same level.Conclusions: The non-linear operation within the DNN model could successfully learn the hidden pattern from the combination of three features. Additionally, the class weight parameter avoided the model ignoring the minority class by giving more weight for this class in the loss function. The feature engineering process seemed to obscure the time-series characteristics within the data. This is why LSTM, as one of the best methods for time-series data, failed to perform well in this classification task.

Novel Methods for Elucidating Modality Importance in Multimodal Electrophysiology Classifiers

Multimodal classification is increasingly common in biomedical informatics studies. Many such studies use deep learning classifiers with raw data, which makes explainability difficult. As such, only a few studies have applied explainability methods, and new methods are needed. In this study, we propose sleep stage classification as a testbed for method development and train a convolutional neural network with electroencephalogram (EEG), electrooculogram, and electromyogram data. We then present a global approach that is uniquely adapted for electrophysiology analysis. We further present two local approaches that can identify subject-level differences in explanations that would be obscured by global methods and that can provide insight into the effects of clinical and demographic variables upon the patterns learned by the classifier. We find that EEG is globally the most important modality for all sleep stages, except non-rapid eye movement stage 1 and that local subject-level differences in importance arise. We further show that sex, followed by medication and age had significant effects upon the patterns learned by the classifier. Our novel methods enhance explainability for the growing field of multimodal classification, provide avenues for the advancement of personalized medicine, and yield novel insights into the effects of demographic and clinical variables upon classifiers.