INFORMATION-PROCESSING MODELS FOR SLEEP STAGING

Three different methods of automated sleep staging are described and compared in the paper. The interesting aspect of the comparison is that the inputs to the three different information processing models (an expert system, a belief automaton, and a neural network) are the outputs of the same frontend processor that extracts EEG features. We found out that the level of man-machine agreement is very similar among the systems (around 85%) approaching the level of agreement required among human experts. However, the similarity of performance in such a diversified set of approaches points out the need for enhancing the accuracy of the first level of analysis (EEG feature extraction).