Single-channel EEG classification of sleep stages based on REM microstructure

Rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, or paradoxical sleep, accounts for 20-25% of total night-time sleep in healthy adults and may be related, in pathological cases, to parasomnias. A large percentage of Parkinson's disease patients suffer from sleep disorders, including REM sleep behaviour disorder and hypokinesia; monitoring their sleep cycle and related activities would help to improve their quality of life. There is a need to accurately classify REM and the other stages of sleep in order to properly identify and monitor parasomnias. This study proposes a method for the identification of REM sleep from raw single-channel electroencephalogram data, employing novel features based on REM microstructures. Sleep stage classification was performed by means of random forest (RF) classifier, K-nearest neighbour (K-NN) classifier and random Under sampling boosted trees (RUSBoost); the classifiers were trained using a set of published and novel features. REM detection accuracy ranges from 89% to 92.7%, and the classifiers achieved a F-1 score (REM class) of about 0.83 (RF), 0.80 (K-NN), and 0.70 (RUSBoost). These methods provide encouraging outcomes in automatic sleep scoring and REM detection based on raw single-channel electroencephalogram, assessing the feasibility of a home sleep monitoring device with fewer channels.