Large-scale validation of an automatic EEG arousal detection algorithm using different heterogeneous databases

To assess the validity of an automatic EEG arousal detection algorithm using large patient samples and different heterogeneous databases.

Automatic scorings were confronted with results from human expert scorers on a total of 2768 full-night PSG recordings obtained from two different databases. Of them, 472 recordings were obtained during a clinical routine at our sleep center and were subdivided into two subgroups of 220 (HMC-S) and 252 (HMC-M) recordings each, according to the procedure followed by the clinical expert during the visual review (semi-automatic or purely manual, respectively). In addition, 2296 recordings from the public SHHS-2 database were evaluated against the respective manual expert scorings.

Event-by-event epoch-based validation resulted in an overall Cohen's kappa agreement of κ = 0.600 (HMC-S), 0.559 (HMC-M), and 0.573 (SHHS2). Estimated inter-scorer variability on the datasets was, respectively, κ = 0.594, 0.561 and 0.543. Analyses of the corresponding Arousal Index scores showed associated automatic-human repeatability indices ranges of 0.693-0.771 (HMC-S), 0.646-0.791 (HMC-M), and 0.759-0.791 (SHHS2).

Large-scale validation of our automatic EEG arousal detector on different databases has shown robust performance and good generalization results comparable to the expected levels of human agreement. Special emphasis was put on reproducibility of the results; implementation of our method has been made available online as open source code.