Hybrid scattering-LSTM networks for automated detection of sleep arousals

Early detection of sleep arousal in polysomnographic (PSG) signals is crucial for monitoring or diagnosing sleep disorders and reducing the risk of further complications, including heart disease and blood pressure fluctuations.

In this paper, we present a new automatic detector of non-apnea arousal regions in multichannel PSG recordings. This detector cascades four different modules: a second-order scattering transform (ST) with Morlet wavelets; depthwise-separable convolutional layers; bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layers; and dense layers. While the first two are shared across all channels, the latter two operate in a multichannel formulation. Following a deep learning paradigm, the whole architecture is trained in an end-to-end fashion in order to optimize two objectives: the detection of arousal onset and offset, and the classification of the type of arousal. Main results and Significance: The novelty of the approach is three-fold: it is the first use of a hybrid ST-BiLSTM network with biomedical signals; it captures frequency information lower (0.1 Hz) than the detection sampling rate (0.5 Hz); and it requires no explicit mechanism to overcome class imbalance in the data. In the follow-up phase of the 2018 PhysioNet/CinC Challenge the proposed architecture achieved a state-of-the-art area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.50 on the hidden test data, tied for the second-highest official result overall.