Deep learning for automated sleep monitoring

Wearable electroencephalography (EEG) is a technology that is revolutionising the longitudinal monitoring of neurological and mental disorders, improving the quality of life of patients and accelerating the relevant research. As sleep disorders and other conditions related to sleep quality affect a large part of the population, monitoring sleep at home, over extended periods of time could have significant impact on the quality of life of people who suffer from these conditions. Annotating the sleep architecture of patients, known as sleep stage scoring, is an expensive and time-consuming process that cannot scale to a large number of people. Using wearable EEG and automating sleep stage scoring is a potential solution to this problem. In this thesis, we propose and evaluate two deep learning algorithms for automated sleep stage scoring using a single channel of EEG. In our first method, we use time-frequency analysis for extracting features that closely follow the guidelines that human experts follow, combined with an ensemble of stacked sparse autoencoders as our classification algorithm. In our second method, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for automatically learning filters that are specific to the problem of sleep stage scoring. We achieved state-of-the-art results (mean F1-score 84%; range 82-86%) with our first method and comparably good results with the second (mean F1-score 81%; range 79-83%). Both our methods effectively account for the skewed performance that is usually found in the literature due to sleep stage duration imbalance. We propose a filter analysis and visualisation methodology for CNNs to understand the filters that CNNs learn. Our results indicate that our CNN was able to robustly learn filters that closely follow the sleep scoring guidelines.Open Acces