Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference of the ZEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Vol.

20, NO 4,1998

SLEEP STAGE DIAGNOSIS SYSTEM WITH NEURAL

NETWORK ANALYSIS
Takamasa Shimada, Tsuyoshi Shiina, and Yoichi Saito
Institute of Information Sciences and Electronics, University of Tsukuba
1-1-1 Tennoudai, Tsukuba-City 305-8573, Japan, Telephone,Fax: +8 1-298-53-6032
E-mail: shimada@milab.is.tsukuba.ac.jp
*Research Institute for EEG Analysis
1-9-1 Nakasato, Kitaku, Tokyo 101,Japan
Abstract-Information of sleep stage is one of the most
important clue for diagnosis of mental condition and
disease in psychiatry. So far we have proposed a method
of detection of characteristic waves in sleep EEG and
diagnosing the sleep stages of the segmented short-terms
by neural networks analysis. And we showed that it was
able to diagnose the sleep stages to some extent by
recognizing the time-varying spectral patterns of
characteristic waves. There remains, however, a problem
that results in stage diagnosis often become unstable, since
the contextual relation between the present and adjacent
segments is not considered. In this work, a method of
diagnosing the sleep stage more accurately is proposed
and its performance is evaluated. In the method, the
additional neural networks processing is combined with
the previous system for recognizing the context of stage
sequences. As a result, it is proved that detection ratio is
improved to a considerable extent by utilizing the
contextual information on stages and the proper duration
exists for obtaining high performance.

Index Terms -EEG,neural network, characteristic waves,

sleep stages, contextual diagnosis.

We have proposed a new type of Neural Network SRNN

(Sleep EEG Recognition Neural Network) for detecting the
several important characteristic waves in EEG in [l]. By
using SRNN, we showed the significant improving about the
detection rate of especially short term characteristic waves in
EEG.
In this paper, we dealt with sleep stage diagnosis system
with SRNN and following two neural networks. One is
referred to as SSNN (Sleep Stage Diagnosis Neural Network)
which was designed for diagnosing sleep stage. The other is
referred to as C D W (Contextual Diagnosis Neural Network)
which work to promote the correct decision rate by
considering contextual relation of appearance of characteristic
wave. As a result, proposed system attain a higher
performance of diagnosis of the sleep stage than conventional
method based on only spectrum pattern information.

11. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SLEEP STAGE

DIAGNOSIS SYSTEM
The sleep stage diagnosis system consists of three blocks. The
first block has a function of detecting the characteristic waves
in EEG signal by using SRNN. And the second is for

I. INTRODUCTION
In psychiatry, sleep staging is one of the most important
means for diagnosis. The sleep staging of EEG, however, is
liable to be subjective since it depends on the doctors skill
and requires much labor. An automatic sleep stage diagnosis
system must therefore be developed to reduce doctors labor
and realize quantitative diagnosis of sleep EEG.
Most conventional methods of diagnosing the sleep stage,
however, use long-term spectrum analysis [4][5]. Such
analysis is unable to detect transient and isolated
characteristic waves (such a hump wave) from sleep EEG
accurately. As a result, it is not possible to precisely diagnose
the sleep stage based on characteristic waves as doctors do,
though a roughly diagnosis is possible.
Moreover some methods are based on a kind of template
matching. This makes it difficult to cope with the large
variation of EEG, such as fluctuations of the frequency
pattern and the differences between individuals.
0-7803-5164-9/98/$10.000 1998 IEEE

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... / / \ X I

\\

...

Input laycr

- /

Tim

Illputsmp

Fig. 1 Architecture of S R

Output layer

Hidden layer 2

Hidden layer 1
3-16

Fig. 3 Architecture of CDNN

Input layer

1 (m+ 3a < W

Fig. 2 Architecture of SSNN

")

' ( f k - m, (m
3a

k ) )

p ( f k )< m + 3a)

(2)

0 (P(h.) < m)

diagnosing the sleep stage based on the generating pattern of

Where P(fk) is the logarithmic power spectrum
characteristic waves detected in the first block by using multi- coefficient, and m and U are the mean and standard
layered neural network (SSNN). Moreover, we considered the deviation of all logarithmic spectrum data over whole time
contextual information for sleep stages diagnosis. Our system range.
diagnoses sleep stage based on the information of
characteristic waves as doctors, while conventional system is
based on spectrum pattern.
Figure 1 and Figure 2 show the architectures of these neural
networks.
Figure 3 shows the architecture of neural network of
contextual sleep stage diagnosis. It is called CDNN
(Contextual Diagnosis Neural Network) in this paper. This
neural network has 10 units at both the first hidden layer and
the second hidden layer, and totally has three layers. This is a
feed forward type neural network.
(alspmdle
Output layer has five units. The sleep stage at the
considering period is decided by the largest firing unit of
them.

111. INPUT DATA FORMAT AND LEARNING

PROCEDURE
A. Input data format
The training or tutorial data for the learning process is
generated as follows. First, the EEG data is sampled (at the
rate of 200 Hz) with a 0.64 sec (128-point)hamming window.
Its logarithmic power spectrum coefficients are calculated by
FFT and 12 coefficients of lower frequency are normalized by
Eqs. (1) and (2), and used for input data.

f, = kAf (k = 0,1,2,...,11 . Af

200
z 1S6Hz)
128

(1)

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Fig. 4 Characteristic waves in EEG and input

data matrix

Fire levd

,.

a wave*,
htuw

0,

spindle
slow1

slow2,

wake
1

Fig.

Tmic (hour)

Result

of

detection

n n

of

Time(hour)

@)

characteristic waves

wake n

One data matrix consists of 11 logarithmic spectrum data

sets so that the time duration of one matrix corresponds to
3.84 sec and the frequency ranges from 0 to 17.2 Hz (Figure
4). The EEG data is processed by shifting the input data
window or the input layer by a half size of the window, i.e.,
1.29 sec.
Fig. 6 Results of sleep stage recognition (a)

B. Learning procedure
We used the following five types of characteristic waves for
learning procedure;

Doctor's analysis. (b) A result of recognition by

SR", SSNN and CDNN. (c) A result which was
obtained from spectrum.

(I) spindle
(1I)hump
(111) alpha wave
seconds). Figure 5 shows the time when output firing value is
(IV) slow 1
over the threshold. This figure shows the characteristic waves
(V) slow 2
are
generated corresponding to sleep stage.
The total time length of input data for learning procedure is
twenty five minutes. Slow 1 and slow 2 is discriminated by
the duration of slow wave included in one data period. In slow
1, from 20 to 50% and in slow 2, over 50% of slow wave is
Subject B
included. This definition is based on the stage 3 and stage 4
defined by Rechtschaffen.
The neural network was trained as when one of
characteristic wave is shown at input scope, the corresponding
one of output neuron of SRNN fires.
Next, SSNN is trained as that proper output neuron fires
when input data is shown at input scope by backpropagation
method. The applied sleep stages are wake, stage 1, stage 2,
stage 3 and stage 4. The total length of training data is
668,160 points (55 minutes 40.8 sec). This data is fore 20%
part of test data (2,595,840 points, 3 hours 36 minutes 19.2
second).
Finally CDNN is trained using the SRNN output and
tutorial data. Correct sleep stage labels of data were decided
Proposed Conventional
by medical doctor's judgement.
method
method

IV. RESULT

Fig. 7 Comparison of our method with

one of the conventional methods which

A. Detecting characteristic waves

Characteristic waves were detected by SRNN. The length of
test data is 2,595,840 points (3 hours 36 minutes 19.2
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uses only power spectrum as evidence.

B. Sleep stage diagnosis

Figure 6 (a) shows the medical doctor's diagnosis of sleep
stage. Horizontal axis shows the time and vertical axis shows
the sleep stage.
Number of period judged correctly
77=
x loo[%]
(3)
all period
The back-propagation algorithm was applied in the learning
procedure. Fore 20% of all data was used as training data. We
used two subject's data A and B. Figure 6 (b) shows the result
of sleep stage diagnosis by SRNN, SSNN and CDNN. The
correct rate defined as follows is 82.0%.
On the other hand, we made an experiment on the
conventional method which used only spectrum pattern for
diagnosing sleep stage as shown in Figure 6(c).
Figure 7 shows the correct rate.
This result shows the our proposing method has much more
ability than conventional method.

V. CONCLUSION
For sleep stage diagnosis, most of conventional system
using only average of spectrum pattern of long period. On the
other hand, the system proposed in this paper is based on the
existence of important characteristic waves. And for more
correct diagnosis, contextual analysis is considered.
At the first block of our system, several important
characteristic waves were detected by SRNN. At the second
block, sleep stage diagnosis was implemented by SSNN based
on the output signals of SRNN. Finally, the contextual
analysis was applied to the SSNN output. As the result, the
proposal method showed higher ably of diagnosing sleep
stage than conventional method.
For future work, we plan to investigate the generalization,
that is, effect of neural network for training data of one
subject to other large number of subjects.
REFERENCES
[l] T. SHIMADA and T. SHIINA, "Detection of
Characteristic Waves of Sleep EEG by Neural Network
Analysis", in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Biomed. Eng., pp. 823824, 1995
[2] A. Waibel, T. Hanazawa, G. Hinton, K. Shikano and K.
Lang, "Phoneme recognition using time-delay neural
networks," IEEE Trans. Acoust., Speech, Signal Processing,
vol. 37, pp.328-339, 1989.
[3] Richard P. Lippmann, "An Introduction to Computing
with Neural Nets," IEEE ASSP Mag., pp.4-22, apr. 1987
[4] Jose C. Principe and Jack R. Smith, "SAMICOS-A Sleep
Analyzing Microcomputer System," IEEE Trans. Biomed.
Eng., vol. BME-33, pp. 935-941, 1986
[5] Jose C. Principe, Sunit K. Gala and Tae G. Chang,
"Sleep Staging Automaton Based on the Theory of Evidence,"
IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng.,vol. 36, pp. 503-509, 1989

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