Reliable automatic sleep stage classification based on hybrid intelligence

Sleep staging is a vital aspect of sleep assessment, serving as a critical tool for evaluating the quality of sleep and identifying sleep disorders. Manual sleep staging is a laborious process, while automatic sleep staging is seldom utilized in clinical practice due to issues related to the inadequate accuracy and interpretability of classification results in automatic sleep staging models. In this work, a hybrid intelligent model is presented for automatic sleep staging, which integrates data intelligence and knowledge intelligence, to attain a balance between accuracy, interpretability, and generalizability in the sleep stage classification. Specifically, it is built on any combination of typical electroencephalography (EEG) and electrooculography (EOG) channels, including a temporal fully convolutional network based on the U-Net architecture and a multi-task feature mapping structure. The experimental results show that, compared to current interpretable automatic sleep staging models, our model achieves a Macro-F1 score of 0.804 on the ISRUC dataset and 0.780 on the Sleep-EDFx dataset. Moreover, we use knowledge intelligence to address issues of excessive jumps and unreasonable sleep stage transitions in the coarse sleep graphs obtained by the model. We also explore the different ways knowledge intelligence affects coarse sleep graphs by combining different sleep graph correction methods. Our research can offer convenient support for sleep physicians, indicating its significant potential in improving the efficiency of clinical sleep staging.