MAGSleepNet: Adaptively multi-scale temporal focused sleep staging model for multi-age groups

Deep learning-based automatic sleep staging methods have been widely applied for sleep scoring and sleep diagnosis. However, most methods consider only a single temporal scale when dealing with sleep signals. Furthermore, these methods are limited to target only a single-age group or single dataset. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale temporally focused sleep staging model, MAGSleepNet, which can be used for multi-age groups simultaneously. MAGSleepNet consists of (1) a group age classification (GAC) module that can offer a preliminary screening on epidemic estimation of multiple age, (2) a dimensional expansion module (DEM) that can expand the dimension of the input signals, (3) a sequential multi-scale convolutional neural network (SMCNN) that extracts multi-scale features and short-time temporal information, and (4) sequence temporal encoder (STE) that extracts sequential temporal information. In addition, two auxiliary tasks are used to complement the short-time temporal information and to reassign the probabilities of different age groups to enhance the model robustness, respectively. The MAGSleepNet is evaluated in adult, child and infant, tested on MASS, CHAT, and CHFU datasets with accruacy of 86.7%, 80.1% and 66.5%, outperforming the state-of -the-art methods. Based on the excellent performance of the proposed method, it is expected to pave the way for automatic sleep staging methods with strong generalizability for multiple age groups.