Delay differential analysis for dynamical sleep spindle detection

J Neurosci Methods. 2019 Mar 15:316:12-21. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2019.01.009. Epub 2019 Jan 30.

Abstract

Background: Sleep spindles are involved in memory consolidation and other cognitive functions. Numerous automated methods for detection of spindles have been proposed; most of these rely on spectral analysis in some form. However, none of these approaches are ideal, and novel approaches to the problem could provide additional insights.

New method: Here, we apply delay differential analysis (DDA), a time-domain technique based on nonlinear dynamics to detect sleep spindles in human intracranial sleep data, including laminar electrode, stereoelectroencephalogram (sEEG), and electrocorticogram (ECoG) recordings.

Results: We show that this approach is computationally fast, generalizable, requires minimal preprocessing, and provides excellent agreement with human scoring.

Comparison with existing methods: We compared the method with established methods on a set of intracranial recordings and this method provided the highest agreement with human expert scoring when evaluated with F1 score while being the second-fastest to run. We also compared the results on the DREAMS surface EEG data, where the method produced a higher average F1 score than all other tested methods except the automated detections published with the DREAMS data. Further, in addition to being a fast and reliable method for spindle detection, DDA also provides a novel characterization of spindle activity based on nonlinear dynamical content of the data.

Conclusions: This additional, non-frequency-based perspective could prove particularly useful for certain atypical spindles, or identifying spindles of different types.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Brain Waves / physiology*
  • Drug Resistant Epilepsy / physiopathology
  • Electrocorticography / methods*
  • Electrocorticography / standards
  • Humans
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Sleep Stages / physiology*