Deep sleep staging networks have reached top performance on large-scale datasets. However, these models perform poorer when training and testing on small sleep cohorts due to data inefficiency. Transferring well-trained models from large-scale datasets (source domain) to small sleep cohorts (target domain) is a promising solution but still remains challenging due to the domain-shift issue. In this work, an unsupervised domain adaptation approach, domain statistics alignment (DSA), is developed to bridge the gap between the data distribution of source and target domains. DSA adapts the source models on the target domain by modulating the domain-specific statistics of deep features stored in the Batch Normalization (BN) layers. Furthermore, we have extended DSA by introducing cross-domain statistics in each BN layer to perform DSA adaptively (AdaDSA). The proposed methods merely need the well-trained source model without access to the source data, which may be proprietary and inaccessible. DSA and AdaDSA are universally applicable to various deep sleep staging networks that have BN layers. We have validated the proposed methods by extensive experiments on two state-of-the-art deep sleep staging networks, DeepSleepNet+ and U-time. The performance was evaluated by conducting various transfer tasks on six sleep databases, including two large-scale databases, MASS and SHHS, as the source domain, four small sleep databases as the target domain. Thereinto, clinical sleep records acquired in Huashan Hospital, Shanghai, were used. The results show that both DSA and AdaDSA could significantly improve the performance of source models on target domains, providing novel insights into the domain generalization problem in sleep staging tasks.

Deep learning methods have become an important tool for automatic sleep staging in recent years. However, most of the existing deep learning-based approaches are sharply constrained by the input modalities, where any insertion, substitution, and deletion of input modalities would directly lead to the unusable of the model or a deterioration in the performance. To solve the modality heterogeneity problems, a novel network architecture named MaskSleepNet is proposed. It consists of a masking module, a multi-scale convolutional neural network (MSCNN), a squeezing and excitation (SE) block, and a multi-headed attention (MHA) module. The masking module consists of a modality adaptation paradigm that can cooperate with modality discrepancy. The MSCNN extracts features from multiple scales and specially designs the size of the feature concatenation layer to prevent invalid or redundant features from zero-setting channels. The SE block further optimizes the weights of the features to optimize the network learning efficiency. The MHA module outputs the prediction results by learning the temporal information between the sleeping features. The performance of the proposed model was validated on two publicly available datasets, Sleep-EDF Expanded (Sleep-EDFX) and Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies (MASS), and a clinical dataset, Huashan Hospital Fudan University (HSFU). The proposed MaskSleepNet can achieve favorable performance with input modality discrepancy, e.g. for single-channel EEG signal, it can reach 83.8%, 83.4%, 80.5%, for two-channel EEG+EOG signals it can reach 85.0%, 84.9%, 81.9% and for three-channel EEG+EOG+EMG signals, it can reach 85.7%, 87.5%, 81.1% on Sleep-EDFX, MASS, and HSFU, respectively. In contrast the accuracy of the state-of-the-art approach which fluctuated widely between 69.0% and 89.4%. The experimental results exhibit that the proposed model can maintain superior performance and robustness in handling input modality discrepancy issues.

Most existing neonatal sleep staging approaches applied multiple EEG channels to obtain good performance. However, it potentially increased the computational complexity and led to an increased risk of skin disruption to neonates during data acquisition. In this paper, a multi-scale hierarchical neural network (MS-HNN) with a squeeze and excitation (SE) block for neonatal sleep staging is presented in this study on the basis of a single EEG channel. MS-HNN composes of multi-scale convolutional neural network (MSCNN), temporal information learning (TIL) module, and squeeze and excitation (SE) block. MSCNN can extract features from different scales and frequencies, and TIL module can acquire the transition information among adjacent stages. In addition, for these extracted features, SE block can selectively concentrate on informative features and weaken redundant features for achieving better performance. The proposed approach was validated on a clinical dataset involving 64 neonates from the Children’s Hospital of Fudan University (CHFU). The proposed network achieves an accuracy of 75.4% and 76.5% for three-class automatic neonatal sleep staging with the single-EEG channel and the eight-EEG channels, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed method can maintain good performance by making full use of the information in the single channel while reducing the channels to control the computational overhead.

Sleep staging is the essential step in sleep quality assessment and sleep disorders diagnosis. However, most current automatic sleep staging approaches use recurrent neural networks (RNN), resulting in a relatively large training burden. Moreover, these methods only extract information of the whole epoch or adjacent epochs, ignoring the local signal variations within epoch. To address these issues, a novel deep learning architecture named segmented attention network (SAN) is proposed in this paper. The architecture can be divided into feature extraction (FE) and time sequence encoder (TSE). The FE module consists of multiple multiscale CNN (MMCNN) and residual squeeze and excitation block (SE block). The former extracts features from multiple equal-length EEG segments and the latter reinforced the features. The TSE module based on a multi-head attention mechanism could capture the temporal information in the features extracted by FE module. Noteworthy, in SAN, we replaced the RNN module with a TSE module for temporal learning and made the network faster. The evaluation of the model was performed on two widely used public datasets, Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies (MASS) and Sleep-EDFX, and one clinical dataset from Huashan Hospital of Fudan University, Shanghai, China (HSFU). The proposed model achieved the accuracy of 85.5%, 86.4%, 82.5% on Sleep-EDFX, MASS and HSFU, respectively. The experimental results exhibited favorable performance and consistent improvements of SAN on different datasets in comparison with the state-of-the-art studies. It also proved the necessity of sleep staging by integrating the local characteristics within epochs and adjacent informative features among epochs.

Elimination of intra-artifacts in EEG has been overlooked in most of the existing sleep staging systems, especially in deep learning-based approaches. Whether intra-artifacts, originated from the eye movement, chin muscle firing, or heart beating, etc., in EEG signals would lead to a positive or a negative masking effect on deep learning-based sleep staging systems was investigated in this paper. We systematically analyzed several traditional pre-processing methods involving fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA), Information Maximization (Infomax), and Second-order Blind Source Separation (SOBI). On top of these methods, a SOBI-WT method based on the joint use of the SOBI and Wavelet Transform (WT) is proposed. It offered an effective solution for suppressing artifact components while retaining residual informative data. To provide a comprehensive comparative analysis, these pre-processing methods were applied to eliminate the intra-artifacts and the processed signals were fed to two ready-to-use deep learning models, namely two-step hierarchical neural network (THNN) and SimpleSleepNet for automatic sleep staging. The evaluation was performed on two widely used public datasets, Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies (MASS) and Sleep-EDF Expanded, and a clinical dataset that was collected in Huashan Hospital of Fudan University, Shanghai, China (HSFU). The proposed SOBI-WT method increased the accuracy from 79.0% to 81.3% on MASS, 83.3% to 85.7% on Sleep-EDF Expanded, and 75.5% to 77.1% on HSFU compared with the raw EEG signal, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the intra-artifacts bring out a masking negative impact on the deep learning-based sleep staging systems and the proposed SOBI-WT method has the best performance in diminishing this negative impact compared with other artifact elimination methods.