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Main Authors: Strøm, Jesper, Skjærbæk, Casper, Bertelsen, Natasha Becker, Simonsen, Steffen Torpe, Okkels, Niels, Bertram, David, Röttgen, Sinah, Kufer, Konstantin, Mikkelsen, Kaare B., Otto, Marit, Jennum, Poul Jørgen, Borghammer, Per, Sommerauer, Michael, Kidmose, Preben
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09793
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author Strøm, Jesper
Skjærbæk, Casper
Bertelsen, Natasha Becker
Simonsen, Steffen Torpe
Okkels, Niels
Bertram, David
Röttgen, Sinah
Kufer, Konstantin
Mikkelsen, Kaare B.
Otto, Marit
Jennum, Poul Jørgen
Borghammer, Per
Sommerauer, Michael
Kidmose, Preben
author_facet Strøm, Jesper
Skjærbæk, Casper
Bertelsen, Natasha Becker
Simonsen, Steffen Torpe
Okkels, Niels
Bertram, David
Röttgen, Sinah
Kufer, Konstantin
Mikkelsen, Kaare B.
Otto, Marit
Jennum, Poul Jørgen
Borghammer, Per
Sommerauer, Michael
Kidmose, Preben
contents Isolated REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is a key prodromal marker of Parkinson's disease (PD), and video-polysomnography (vPSG) remains the diagnostic gold standard. However, manual sleep staging is particularly challenging in neurodegenerative diseases due to EEG abnormalities and fragmented sleep, making PSG assessments a bottleneck for deploying new RBD screening technologies at scale. We adapted U-Sleep, a deep neural network, for generalizable sleep staging in PD and iRBD. A pretrained U-Sleep model, based on a large, multisite non-neurodegenerative dataset (PUB; 19,236 PSGs across 12 sites), was fine-tuned on research datasets from two centers (Lundbeck Foundation Parkinson's Disease Research Center (PACE) and the Cologne-Bonn Cohort (CBC); 112 PD, 138 iRBD, 89 age-matched controls. The resulting model was evaluated on an independent dataset from the Danish Center for Sleep Medicine (DCSM; 81 PD, 36 iRBD, 87 sleep-clinic controls). A subset of PSGs with low agreement between the human rater and the model (Cohen's $κ$ < 0.6) was re-scored by a second blinded human rater to identify sources of disagreement. Finally, we applied confidence-based thresholds to optimize REM sleep staging. The pretrained model achieved mean $κ$ = 0.81 in PUB, but $κ$ = 0.66 when applied directly to PACE/CBC. By fine-tuning the model, we developed a generalized model with $κ$ = 0.74 on PACE/CBC (p < 0.001 vs. the pretrained model). In DCSM, mean and median $κ$ increased from 0.60 to 0.64 (p < 0.001) and 0.64 to 0.69 (p < 0.001), respectively. In the interrater study, PSGs with low agreement between the model and the initial scorer showed similarly low agreement between human scorers. Applying a confidence threshold increased the proportion of correctly identified REM sleep epochs from 85% to 95.5%, while preserving sufficient (> 5 min) REM sleep for 95% of subjects.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fully-automated sleep staging: multicenter validation of a generalizable deep neural network for Parkinson's disease and isolated REM sleep behavior disorder
Strøm, Jesper
Skjærbæk, Casper
Bertelsen, Natasha Becker
Simonsen, Steffen Torpe
Okkels, Niels
Bertram, David
Röttgen, Sinah
Kufer, Konstantin
Mikkelsen, Kaare B.
Otto, Marit
Jennum, Poul Jørgen
Borghammer, Per
Sommerauer, Michael
Kidmose, Preben
Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
Isolated REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is a key prodromal marker of Parkinson's disease (PD), and video-polysomnography (vPSG) remains the diagnostic gold standard. However, manual sleep staging is particularly challenging in neurodegenerative diseases due to EEG abnormalities and fragmented sleep, making PSG assessments a bottleneck for deploying new RBD screening technologies at scale. We adapted U-Sleep, a deep neural network, for generalizable sleep staging in PD and iRBD. A pretrained U-Sleep model, based on a large, multisite non-neurodegenerative dataset (PUB; 19,236 PSGs across 12 sites), was fine-tuned on research datasets from two centers (Lundbeck Foundation Parkinson's Disease Research Center (PACE) and the Cologne-Bonn Cohort (CBC); 112 PD, 138 iRBD, 89 age-matched controls. The resulting model was evaluated on an independent dataset from the Danish Center for Sleep Medicine (DCSM; 81 PD, 36 iRBD, 87 sleep-clinic controls). A subset of PSGs with low agreement between the human rater and the model (Cohen's $κ$ < 0.6) was re-scored by a second blinded human rater to identify sources of disagreement. Finally, we applied confidence-based thresholds to optimize REM sleep staging. The pretrained model achieved mean $κ$ = 0.81 in PUB, but $κ$ = 0.66 when applied directly to PACE/CBC. By fine-tuning the model, we developed a generalized model with $κ$ = 0.74 on PACE/CBC (p < 0.001 vs. the pretrained model). In DCSM, mean and median $κ$ increased from 0.60 to 0.64 (p < 0.001) and 0.64 to 0.69 (p < 0.001), respectively. In the interrater study, PSGs with low agreement between the model and the initial scorer showed similarly low agreement between human scorers. Applying a confidence threshold increased the proportion of correctly identified REM sleep epochs from 85% to 95.5%, while preserving sufficient (> 5 min) REM sleep for 95% of subjects.
title Fully-automated sleep staging: multicenter validation of a generalizable deep neural network for Parkinson's disease and isolated REM sleep behavior disorder
topic Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09793