Extracting Multi-Scale and Salient Features by MSE Based U-Structure and CBAM for Sleep Staging

According to the World Health Organization, more and more people in the world are suffering from somnipathy. Automatic sleep staging is critical for assessing sleep quality and assisting in the diagnosis of psychiatric and neurological disorders caused by somnipathy. Many researchers employ deep learning methods for sleep stage classification and have achieved high performance. However, there are still no effective methods to modeling intrinsic characteristics of salient wave in different sleep stages from physiological signals. And transition rules hidden in signals from one to another sleep stage cannot be identified and captured. In addition, class imbalance problem in dataset is not conducive to building a robust classification model. To solve these problems, we construct a deep neural network combining MSE(Multi-Scale Extraction) based U-structure and CBAM (Convolutional Block Attention Module) to extract the multi-scale salient waves from single-channel EEG signals. The U-structured convolutional network with MSE is utilized to extract multi-scale features from raw EEG signals. After that, the CBAM is used to focus more on salient variation and then learn transition rules between successive sleep stages. Further, a class adaptive weight cross entropy loss function is proposed to solve the class imbalance problem. Experiments in three public datasets show that our model greatly outperform the state-of-the-art results compared with existing methods. The overall accuracy and macro F1-score (Sleep-EDF-39: 90.3%-86.2, Sleep-EDF-153: 89.7%-85.2, SHHS: 86.8%-83.5) on three public datasets suggest that the proposed model is very promising to completely take place of human experts for sleep staging.

Automated summary

According to the World Health Organization, the prevalence of somnipathy is increasing globally. Automatic sleep staging is crucial for assessing sleep quality and diagnosing psychiatric and neurological disorders caused by somnipathy. While researchers have employed deep learning methods for sleep stage classification, the modeling of intrinsic characteristics of salient waves in different sleep stages and identification of transition rules between stages remain challenging. Furthermore, the class imbalance problem in datasets hampers robust classification models. To address these issues, a deep neural network combining MSE-based U-structure and CBAM is proposed to extract multi-scale salient waves from single-channel EEG signals. The experimental results on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model compared to existing methods.