An efficient automatic arousals detection algorithm in single channel EEG

•A novel automatic arousal detection algorithm is proposed.•Single channel electroencephalogram is used without any pre-processing step.•Two novel features were obtained using the continuous wavelet transform.•Works at the same accuracy and reproducibility without case-specific sensitivity. Electroencephalographic arousal is a transient waveform that instantaneously happens in sleep as an inherent component. It has distinctive amplitude and frequency features. However, it is visually difficult to distinguish arousal from the background of the electroencephalogram. This visual scoring is important for brain researches, sleep studies, sleep stage scorings and assessment of sleep disorders. The scoring process is a time-consuming and difficult clinical procedure which is evaluated by sleep experts. It may also have subjective consequences due to the variability of personal expertise of physicians. Conversely, this scoring process can be significantly accelerated with computer-aided automated algorithms. Moreover, reproducible and objective results can be obtained. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm for the automatic detection of electroencephalographic arousals in sleep polysomnographic recordings. The approach uses a well-known time-frequency localization method, the continuous wavelet transform, to identify relevant arousal patterns. Special emphasis was carried out to produce a robust, reliable, fast and artifact tolerant algorithm. In the first part, the electroencephalographic scalogram, the squared magnitude of the continuous wavelet transform, was obtained. The mean and variance of the scalogram coefficients were determined as novel features. Support vector machine was applied as a classifier. Half of the recordings were used for training with five-fold cross-validation and a high accuracy training rate was obtained. Then, the rest of the recordings were used for testing. As a result, the overall sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and positive predictive value of the algorithm are 94.67%, 99.33%, 98.2%, and 97.93%, respectively. In this paper, we have shown that the electroencephalographic arousal pattern can be characterized by the scalogram in the wavelet domain. The proposed algorithm works with high accuracy, reproducibility and gives objective results without case-specific sensitivity. [Display omitted]