Computer-aided sleep staging in clinical environment.

In the present paper we will comment on how we have been implementing computer-aided sleep staging (CAS) in the Department of Psychiatry, Erasmus Hospital (Free University of Brussels). Major features of our CAS include real-time stage estimation, full report and hypnogram available in the morning, and evolution of state variables throughout the night (e.g. electroencephalographic spectral characteristics, eye movement density, myographic activity). Parallel, we report an extensive validation study of this system on 50 subjects divided in two groups of 25 patients with psychiatric diseases, and 25 normal subjects.