Automatic Sleep Staging in Patients With Obstructive Sleep Apnea Using Single-Channel Frontal EEG

Study objectives: Reliable sleep staging is difficult to obtain from home sleep testing for diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), especially when it is self-applied. Hence, the current study aimed to develop a single frontal electroencephalography-based automatic sleep staging system (ASSS).

Methods: The ASSS system was developed on a clinical dataset, with a high percentage of participants with OSA. The F4-M1 signal extracted from 62 participants (62.9% having OSA) was used to build a four-stage classifier. Performance of the ASSS was tested in a holdout set of 58 patients (60.3% having OSA) with epoch-by-epoch and whole-night agreement for sleep staging compared with expert scoring of polysomnography.

Results: Mean all-stage percentage agreement was 75.52% (95% confidence interval, 72.90 to 78.13) (kappa 0.62; 95% confidence interval, 0.58 to 0.65), with mean percentage agreement for wake, light sleep, deep sleep (DS), and rapid eye movement of 78.04%, 70.97%, 83.65%, and 75.00%, respectively. The whole-night agreement was good-excellent (intraclass correlation coefficient, 0.74 to 0.88) for sleep onset latency, wake after sleep onset, total sleep time, and sleep efficiency. Compared to the non-OSA subset, the OSA subset had lower agreement for DS.

Conclusions: Our results indicate that a single-channel F4-M1 based ASSS was sufficient for sleep staging in a population with a high percentage of participants with OSA.