A novel system for automatic detection of K-complexes in sleep EEG

Sleep staging process is applied to diagnose sleep-related disorders by sleep experts through analyzing sleep signals such as electroencephalogram (EEG), electrooculogram and electromyogram of subjects and determining the stages in 30-s-length time parts of sleep named as epochs. Subjects enter several stages during the sleep, and N-REM2 is one of them which has also the highest duration among the other stages. Approximately half of the sleep consists of N-REM2. One of the important parameters in determining N-REM2 stage is K-complex (Kc). In this study, some time and frequency analysis methods were used to determine the locations of Kcs, automatically. These are singular value decomposition (SVD), variational mode decomposition and discrete wavelet transform. The performance of them in detecting Kcs was compared. Furthermore, systems with combinations of these methods were presented with logic AND operations. The EEG recordings of seven subjects were obtained from the Sleep Research Laboratory of Necmettin Erbakan University. A database with total 359 Kcs in 320 epochs was prepared from the recordings. According to the results, the highest average recognition rate was found as 92.29% for the SVD method. Thanks to this study, the sleep experts can find out whether there were Kcs in related epochs and also know their locations in these epochs, automatically. Also, it will help automatic sleep stage classification systems.