Performance Evaluation of an Artificial Neural Network Automatic Spindle Detection System

Sleep spindles are transient waveforms found in the electroencephalogram (EEG) of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. Sleep spindles are used for the classification of sleep stages and have been studied in the context of various psychiatric and neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and the so-called Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), which is considered to be a transitional stage between normal aging and dementia. The visual processing of whole-night sleep EEG recordings is tedious. Therefore, various techniques have been proposed for automatically detecting sleep spindles. In the present work an automatic sleep spindle detection system, that has been previously proposed, using a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) Artificial Neural Network (ANN), is evaluated in detecting spindles of both healthy controls, as well as MCI and AD patients. An investigation is carried also concerning the visual detection process, taking into consideration the feedback information provided by the automatic detection system. Results indicate that the sensitivity of the detector was 81.4%, 62.2%, and 83.3% and the false positive rate was 34%, 11.5%, and 33.3%, for the control, MCI, and AD groups, respectively. The visual detection process had a sensitivity rate ranging from 46.5% to 60% and a false positive rate ranging from 4.8% to 19.2%.