Neonatal sleep stage identification using long short-term memory learning system

Neonatal sleep analysis at the neonatal intensive care units (NICU) is critical for the diagnosis of any brain growth risks during the early stages of life. In this paper, an investigation is carried out on the use of a long short-term memory (LSTM) learning system in automatic sleep stage scoring in neonates. The developed algorithm automatically classifies sleep stages based on inputs from a single channel EEG recording. Up to this date, only a single study have developed an approach for automatic sleep stage scoring in neonatal sleep signals using deep neural network (DNN). A total of 5095 sleep stages signals acquired from EEG recordings of the University of Pittsburgh are used in this study. The sleep stages are annotated by a medical doctor from the Pediatric Neurology Department of Case Western Reserve University for three neonatal sleep stages including the awake (W), active sleep (AS), and quiet sleep (QS) stages on every 60-s epoch. The signals are pre-processed through normalization and filtering. The resulted signals are divided following 4-, 6-, and 10-fold cross-validation schemes. The training and classification process is done using a bi-directional LSTM network classifier built with pre-defined training parameters. At the end, the developed algorithm is evaluated along with a complete summary table that reports the results of this study and other state-of-the-art studies. The current study achieved high levels of Cohen's kappa (κ), accuracy, and F1 score with 91.37%, 96.81%, and 94.43%, respectively. Based on the confusion matrix, the overall true positives percentage reached 95.21%. The developed algorithm gave promising results in automatic sleep stage scoring in neonatal sleep signals. Future work include LSTM architecture and training parameters improvements to enhance the overall accuracy of the classifier.