Classification of Sleep Stage with Biosignal Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Clinicians and researchers divide sleep periods into different sleep stages to analyze the quality of sleep. Despite advances in machine learning, sleep-stage classification is still performed manually. The classification process is tedious and time-consuming, but its automation has not yet been achieved. Another problem is low accuracy due to inconsistencies between somnologists. In this paper, we propose a method to classify sleep stages using a convolutional neural network. The network is trained with EEG and EOG images of time and frequency domains. The images of the biosignal are appropriate as inputs to the network, as these are natural inputs provided to somnologists in polysomnography. To validate the network, the sleep-stage classifier was trained and tested using the public Sleep-EDFx dataset. The results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Sleep-EDFx (accuracy 94%, F1 94%). The results demonstrate that the classifier is able to learn features described in the sleep scoring manual from the sleep data.