Ontology-Based Decision Support Tool for Automatic Sleep Staging Using Dual-Channel EEG Data

Abstract

Sleep staging has attracted significant attention as a critical step in auxiliary diagnosis of sleep disease. To avoid subjectivity of doctor’s manual sleep staging, and to realize scientific management of massive physiological data, an ontology-based decision support tool is proposed. The tool implements an automated procedure for sleep staging using dual-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. First of all, it encodes EEG features, sleep-related concepts and other contextual information to “EEG-Sleep ontology”. Secondly, a rule-set is constructed based on a data mining technique. Finally, the first two steps are processed in a reasoning engine which is automatically assign each 30 s epoch (segment) sleep stage to one of five possible sleep stages: WA, NREM1, NREM2, SWS and REM. The rule set is obtained using EEG data taken from the Sleep-EDF database [EXPANDED] according to the random forest algorithm (RF), we prove that the performance of the proposed method with 89.12% accuracy, and 0.81 Kappa statistics is superior to other algorithms such as Bayesian network, C4.5, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron. Additionally, our proposed approach improved performance when compared to other studies using a small subset of the Sleep-EDF database [EXPANDED].