Detection and Prediction of Microsleeps from EEG using Spatio-Temporal Patterns.

Abstract

A microsleep is a brief lapse in performance due to an involuntary sleep-related loss of consciousness. These episodes are of particular importance in occupations requiring extended unimpaired visuomotor performance, such as driving. Detection and even prediction of microsleeps has the potential to prevent catastrophic events and fatal accidents. In this study, we examined detection and prediction of microsleeps using EEG data of 8 subjects who performed two 1-h sessions of continuous 1-D tracking. A regularized spatio-temporal filtering and classification (RSTFC) method was used to extract features from 5-s EEG segments. These features were then used to train three different linear classifiers: linear discriminant analysis (LDA), sparse Bayesian learning (SBL), and variational Bayesian logistic regression (VBLR). The performance of microsleep state detection and prediction was evaluated using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation. The detection performance measures were AUCROC 0.96, AUCPR 0.52, and phi 0.47. As expected, prediction of microsleep states with a 0.25-s ahead prediction time resulted in slightly lower performances compared to the detection. Prediction performance measures were substantially higher than those achieved with log-power spectral features, i.e., AUCROC 0.95 (cf. 0.90), AUCPR 0.50 (cf. 0.36), and phi 0.46 (cf. 0.34).