Method and system for automated detection of sleep spindles using a single EEG channels based TEO and EMD

Abstract

As a hallmark of N2 sleep stage, sleep spindle detection based on electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings plays a crucial role in analyzing sleep. Hence, how to effectively automatically detect sleep spindle is crucially important. However, many automatic detection methods assume that the signal is stationary, which is inconsistent with the observation that spindle signals have a significant change in amplitude. Thus, some important non-stationary information and the presented evident dynamic characteristics has been ignored.To overcome the aforementioned shortcoming, we propose a novel methodology based on Teager Energy Operator (TEO) and Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) to determine the exact location of sleep spindles using single-channel EEG signals. Because the TEO is sensitive to amplitude variations and energy features, our proposed method is suitable for capturing sleep spindles. We conduct plenty of experiments to evaluate our method. The experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our method. On the DREAMS Sleep Spindles Database, our method achieves 91.83% ± 1.1%, 94.12% ± 3.46%, and 83.38% ± 9.32% for accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity, respectively. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed methodology presented herein achieves better performance as compared to other methods. Moreover, owing to its usage of a single channel of EEG signal, the proposed method will be suitable for edge-device implementation to expedite sleep disorder diagnosis.