Early automatic detection of Parkinson's disease based on sleep recordings.

Summary: Idiopathic rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is most likely the earliest sign of Parkinson's Disease (PD) and is characterized by REM sleep without atonia (RSWA) and consequently increased muscle activity. However, some muscle twitching in normal subjects occurs during REM sleep.

Purpose: There are no generally accepted methods for evaluation of this activity and a normal range has not been established.

Sleep-wake transition in narcolepsy and healthy controls using a support vector machine.

Narcolepsy is characterized by abnormal sleep-wake regulation, causing sleep episodes during the day and nocturnal sleep disruptions. The transitions between sleep and wakefulness can be identified by manual scorings of a polysomnographic recording. The aim of this study was to develop an automatic classifier capable of separating sleep epochs from epochs of wakefulness by using EEG measurements from one channel.

Decreased sleep spindle density in patients with idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder and patients with Parkinson's disease.

Objective: To determine whether sleep spindles (SS) are potentially a biomarker for Parkinson's disease (PD).

Methods: Fifteen PD patients with REM sleep behavior disorder (PD+RBD), 15 PD patients without RBD (PD-RBD), 15 idiopathic RBD (iRBD) patients and 15 age-matched controls underwent polysomnography (PSG). SS were scored in an extract of data from control subjects.

Automatic sleep staging: from young adults to elderly patients using multi-class support vector machine.

Aging is a process that is inevitable, and makes our body vulnerable to age-related diseases. Age is the most consistent factor affecting the sleep structure. Therefore, new automatic sleep staging methods, to be used in both of young and elderly patients, are needed.

Sleep phenomena as an early biomarker for Parkinsonism.

Idiopathic Rapid-Eye-Movement (REM) sleep Behavior Disorder (iRBD) is one of the most potential biomarkers for Parkinson's Disease (PD) and some atypical PD (AP). It is characterized by REM sleep with abnormal high surface EMG (sEMG) activity. Some twitching during REM sleep is normal, but no one has defined what normal is, and no well-defined methodology for measuring muscle activity in REM sleep exists.

Classification of iRBD and Parkinson's disease patients based on eye movements during sleep.

Patients suffering from the sleep disorder idiopathic rapid-eye-movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) have been observed to be in high risk of developing Parkinson's disease (PD). This makes it essential to analyze them in the search for PD biomarkers. This study aims at classifying patients suffering from iRBD or PD based on features reflecting eye movements (EMs) during sleep.

Validation of a novel automatic sleep spindle detector with high performance during sleep in middle aged subjects.

Many of the automatic sleep spindle detectors currently used to analyze sleep EEG are either validated on young subjects or not validated thoroughly. The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a fast and reliable sleep spindle detector with high performance in middle aged subjects. An automatic sleep spindle detector using a bandpass filtering approach and a time varying threshold was developed.

Automatic detection of REM sleep in subjects without atonia.

Idiopathic Rapid-Rye-Movement (REM) sleep Behavior Disorder (iRBD) is a strong early marker of Parkinson's Disease and is characterized by REM sleep without atonia (RSWA) and increased phasic muscle activity. Current proposed methods for detecting RSWA assume the presence of a manually scored hypnogram. In this study a full automatic REM sleep detector, using the EOG and EEG channels, is proposed.

Separation of Parkinson's patients in early and mature stages from control subjects using one EOG channel.

In this study, polysomnographic left side EOG signals from ten control subjects, ten iRBD patients and ten Parkinson's patients were decomposed in time and frequency using wavelet transformation. A total of 28 features were computed as the means and standard deviations in energy measures from different reconstructed detail subbands across all sleep epochs during a whole night of sleep. A subset of features was chosen based on a cross validated Shrunken Centroids Regularized Discriminant Analysis, where the controls were treated as one group and the patients as another.

Attenuated heart rate response is associated with hypocretin deficiency in patients with narcolepsy.

Study Objective: Several studies have suggested that hypocretin-1 may influence the cerebral control of the cardiovascular system. We analyzed whether hypocretin-1 deficiency in narcolepsy patients may result in a reduced heart rate response.

Design: We analyzed the heart rate response during various sleep stages from a 1-night polysomnography in patients with narcolepsy and healthy controls.

Attenuated heart rate response in REM sleep behavior disorder and Parkinson's disease.

The objective of this study was to determine whether patients with Parkinson's disease with and without rapid-eye-movement sleep behavior disorder and patients with idiopathic rapid-eye-movement sleep behavior disorder have an attenuated heart rate response to arousals or to leg movements during sleep compared with healthy controls. Fourteen and 16 Parkinson's patients with and without rapid-eye-movement sleep behavior disorder, respectively, 11 idiopathic rapid-eye-movement sleep behavior disorder patients, and 17 control subjects underwent 1 night of polysomnography. The heart rate response associated with arousal or leg movement from all sleep stages was analyzed from 10 heartbeats before the onset of the sleep event to 15 heartbeats following onset of the sleep event.

A computerized algorithm for arousal detection in healthy adults and patients with Parkinson disease.

Arousals occur from all sleep stages and can be identified as abrupt electroencephalogram (EEG) and electromyogram (EMG) changes. Manual scoring of arousals is time consuming with low interscore agreement. The aim of this study was to design an arousal detection algorithm capable of detecting arousals from non-rapid eye movement (REM) and REM sleep, independent of the subject's age and disease.

Detection of arousals in Parkinson's disease patients.

Arousal from sleep are short awakenings, which can be identified in the EEG as an abrupt change in frequency. Arousals can occur in all sleep stages and the number and frequency increase with age. Frequent arousals during sleep results in sleep fragmentation and is associated with daytime sleepiness.

REM behaviour disorder detection associated with neurodegenerative diseases.

Unlabelled: Abnormal skeleton muscle activity during REM sleep is characterized as REM Behaviour Disorder (RBD), and may be an early marker for different neurodegenerative diseases. Early detection of RBD is therefore highly important, and in this ongoing study a semi-automatic method for RBD detection is proposed by analyzing the motor activity during sleep.

Method: A total number of twelve patients have been involved in this study, six normal controls and six patients diagnosed with Parkinsons Disease (PD) with RBD.