Depression Detection Using an Automatic Sleep Staging Method with an Interpretable Channel-Temporal Attention Mechanism

Despite previous efforts in depression detection studies, there is a scarcity of research on automatic depression detection using sleep structure, and several challenges remain: 1) how to apply sleep staging to detect depression and distinguish easily misjudged classes and 2) how to adaptively capture attentive channel-dimensional information to enhance the interpretability of sleep staging methods. To address these challenges, an automatic sleep staging method based on a channel–temporal attention mechanism and a depression detection method based on sleep structure features are proposed. In sleep staging, a temporal attention mechanism is adopted to update the feature matrix, confidence scores are estimated for each sleep stage, the weight of each channel is adjusted based on these scores, and the final results are obtained through a temporal convolutional network. In depression detection, seven sleep structure features based on the results of sleep staging are extracted for depression detection between unipolar depressive disorder (UDD) patients, bipolar disorder (BD) patients and healthy subjects. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches, and the visualization of the channel attention mechanism illustrates the interpretability of our method. Additionally, this is the first attempt to employ sleep structure features to automatically detect UDD and BD in patients.