On the Use of Neural Network Techniques to Analyze Sleep EEG Data

This is the third communication on the use of neural network techniques to classify sleep stages. In our first communication we presented the algorithms and the selection of the feature space and its reduction by using evolutionary and genetic procedures. In our second communication we trained the evolutionary optimized networks on the basis of multiple subject data in context with some smoothing algorithms in analogy of Rechtschaffen and Kales (RK). In this third communication we could demonstrate that the robustness concerning individual specific features of automatically generated sleep profiles could be reasonably improved by an additional modification of the procedure used by SASCIA (Sleep Analysis System to Challenge Innovative Artificial Networks). The outputs of nine different networks that were created by the data of 9 different subjects were used simultaneously for classification. The medians of the values obtained in each output measure were selected for the allocation to a sleep stage. The fitness criteria of 16 automatically generated sleep profiles showed reasonable concordance with the expert profile. Even though in single cases the concordance between conventional RK classifications and automatically generated profiles were a few percentages lower, the average correct classification of the 12 classified subjects improved substantially, thus proving that the classifier is more robust against individuum-specific variability. Despite the fact that the expert generally employs three channels (EEG, EMG and EOG), at least to build up sleep profiles, the SASCIA system was able to produce profiles on the basis of only one EEG channel with 80% concordance and a correlation coefficient of 0.86. The feature selections were performed by genetic algorithms and the topologies of the networks were optimized by evolutionary algorithms. This algorithm will now be used for larger sample forward classification.