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, myo-graphic acitivity). 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.