Multichannel sleep spindle detection using sparse low-rank optimization

Background Automated single-channel spindle detectors, for human sleep EEG, are blind to the presence of spindles in other recorded channels unlike visual annotation by a human expert. New method We propose a multichannel spindle detection method that aims to detect global and local spindle activity in human sleep EEG. Using a non-linear signal model, which assumes the input EEG to be the sum of a transient and an oscillatory component, we propose a multichannel transient separation algorithm. Consecutive overlapping blocks of the multichannel oscillatory component are assumed to be low-rank whereas the transient component is assumed to be piecewise constant with a zero baseline. The estimated oscillatory component is used in conjunction with a bandpass filter and the Teager operator for detecting sleep spindles. Results and comparison with other methods The proposed method is applied to two publicly available databases and compared with 7 existing single-channel automated detectors. F₁ scores for the proposed spindle detection method averaged 0.66 (0.02) and 0.62 (0.06) for the two databases, respectively. For an overnight 6 channel EEG signal, the proposed algorithm takes about 4 min to detect sleep spindles simultaneously across all channels with a single setting of corresponding algorithmic parameters. Conclusions The proposed method attempts to mimic and utilize, for better spindle detection, a particular human expert behavior where the decision to mark a spindle event may be subconsciously influenced by the presence of a spindle in EEG channels other than the central channel visible on a digital screen.