Papers › RED: Deep Recurrent Neural Networks for Sleep EEG Event Detection

RED: Deep Recurrent Neural Networks for Sleep EEG Event Detection

15 May 2020arXiv:2005.07795archive 2025-07-28

Nicolás I. Tapia, Pablo A. Estévez

The brain electrical activity presents several short events during sleep that can be observed as distinctive micro-structures in the electroencephalogram (EEG), such as sleep spindles and K-complexes. These events have been associated with biological processes and neurological disorders, making them a research topic in sleep medicine. However, manual detection limits their study because it is time-consuming and affected by significant inter-expert variability, motivating automatic approaches. We propose a deep learning approach based on convolutional and recurrent neural networks for sleep EEG event detection called Recurrent Event Detector (RED). RED uses one of two input representations: a) the time-domain EEG signal, or b) a complex spectrogram of the signal obtained with the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT). Unlike previous approaches, a fixed time window is avoided and temporal context is integrated to better emulate the visual criteria of experts. When evaluated on the MASS dataset, our detectors outperform the state of the art in both sleep spindle and K-complex detection with a mean F1-score of at least 80.9% and 82.6%, respectively. Although the CWT-domain model obtained a similar performance than its time-domain counterpart, the former allows in principle a more interpretable input representation due to the use of a spectrogram. The proposed approach is event-agnostic and can be used directly to detect other types of sleep events.

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Code

nicolasigor/cmorlet-tensorflow mentioned on GitHubtf report

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Tasks

EEG Electroencephalogram (EEG)Event Detection K-complex detection Sleep Micro-event detection Spindle Detection Time Series Analysis

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

Task	Dataset	Model	Metric	Value	Rank at snapshot	Leaderboard	Report
K-complex detection	MASS SS2	RED-CWT	F1-score (@IoU = 0.2)	0.826	#1 of 4	Archive leaderboard	report
K-complex detection	MASS SS2	RED-CWT	F1-score (@IoU = 0.3)	0.827	#1 of 4	Archive leaderboard	report
K-complex detection	MASS SS2	RED-Time	F1-score (@IoU = 0.2)	0.826	#2 of 4	Archive leaderboard	report
K-complex detection	MASS SS2	RED-Time	F1-score (@IoU = 0.3)	0.825	#2 of 4	Archive leaderboard	report
Spindle Detection	MASS SS2	RED-Time	F1-score (@IoU = 0.3)	0.812	#1 of 6	Archive leaderboard	report
Spindle Detection	MASS SS2	RED-CWT	F1-score (@IoU = 0.2)	0.812	#2 of 6	Archive leaderboard	report
Spindle Detection	MASS SS2	RED-CWT	F1-score (@IoU = 0.3)	0.809	#2 of 6	Archive leaderboard	report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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