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Analysis of A-phase transitions during the cyclic alternating pattern under normal sleep

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Abstract

An analysis of the EEG signal during the B-phase and A-phases transitions of the cyclic alternating pattern (CAP) during sleep is presented. CAP is a sleep phenomenon composed by consecutive sequences of A-phases (each A-phase could belong to a possible group A1, A2 or A3) observed during the non-REM sleep. Each A-phase is separated by a B-phase which has the basal frequency of the EEG during a specific sleep stage. The patterns formed by these sequences reflect the sleep instability and consequently help to understand the sleep process. Ten recordings from healthy good sleepers were included in this study. The current study investigates complexity, statistical and frequency signal properties of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings at the transitions: B-phase—A-phase. In addition, classification between the onset–offset of the A-phases and B-phase was carried out with a kNN classifier. The results showed that EEG signal presents significant differences (p < 0.05) between A-phases and B-phase for the standard deviation, energy, sample entropy, Tsallis entropy and frequency band indices. The A-phase onset showed values of energy three times higher than B-phase at all the sleep stages. The statistical analysis of variance shows that more than 80 % of the A-phase onset and offset is significantly different from the B-phase. The classification performance between onset or offset of A-phases and background showed classification values over 80 % for specificity and accuracy and 70 % for sensitivity. Only during the A3-phase, the classification was lower. The results suggest that neural assembles that generate the basal EEG oscillations during sleep present an over-imposed coordination for a few seconds due to the A-phases. The main characteristics for automatic separation between the onset–offset A-phase and the B-phase are the energy at the different frequency bands.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the support of PROMEP through Grant F-PROMEP-39/REV-03, SEP-23-005 and CONACyT Grants CB2010/154623 and CB2012/180604.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, Lateral Av. Salvador Nava s/n, 78290, San Luis Potosí (SLP), Mexico

    Martin Oswaldo Mendez, Alfonso Alba & Edgar Arce-Santana

  2. Lab of Medical Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Ioanna Chouvarda

  3. Biomedical Engineering Department, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Anna Maria Bianchi

  4. Department of Neurology, Sleep Disorders Centre, University of Parma, Parma, Italy

    Andrea Grassi, Guilia Milioli, Mario Giovanni Terzano & Liborio Parrino

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  1. Martin Oswaldo Mendez
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  2. Ioanna Chouvarda
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Correspondence to Martin Oswaldo Mendez.

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Mendez, M.O., Chouvarda, I., Alba, A. et al. Analysis of A-phase transitions during the cyclic alternating pattern under normal sleep. Med Biol Eng Comput 54, 133–148 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-015-1349-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-015-1349-9

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