MATCHING PURSUIT PARAMETRIZATION OF SLEEP SPINDLES

P.J. Durka, K.J. Blinowska

Laboratory of Medical Physics, Warsaw University, Hoza 69, 00-681 Warszawa, Poland
http:/www.fuw.edu.pl~/durka/med_ph.html, durka@fuw.edu.pl, kjbli@fuw.edu.pl
Abstract - Sleep spindles are transients important in
evaluation of sleep EEG. Matching Pursuit (MP) is a
recently introduced adaptive time-frequency method of
signal analysis. Iterative algorithm fits to the local signal
structures waveforms from a large an redundant set.
21 channels of an overnight EEG recording were
subjected to the MP decomposition. Structures
corresponding to sleep spindles were chosen from
waveforms fitted to the signal. In this way sleep spindles
were described in terms of natural parameters, i.e. position
in time and frequency, width in time, amplitude and
phase. Comparison of this automatic detection with visual
analysis showed concordance decreasing with threshold
amplitude. Characteristics of spindles occurrence in time,
frequency and space were evaluated. Results confirmed
several of the hypotheses reported in literature.
INTRODUCTION
Most of the methods of EEG analysis applied up to now
such as Fourier Transform or autoregressive models provided
general frequency characteristics of the time series but did
poorly in describing transients and non-stationary signals.
A progress in respect of evaluation of this kind of signals was
introduced by wavelet transform (WT), but the method has
also some serious limitations related to the pre-defined
orthonormal basis. WT is well suited to the analysis of timelocked phenomena as evoked potentials, but does poorly for
transients occurring more or less randomly in the signal [1].
A general solution for the above limitations can be achieved
by using a redundant set of waveforms instead of orthonormal
basis. However, the problem of choosing the waveforms that
would best explain the signals variance is NP-hard [2].
Matching Pursuit, introduced by Mallat and Zhang in 1993
[3], provides a sub-optimal solution.
Detection of sleep spindles in EEG was traditionally
performed by visual analysis, although several automatic
methods were tuned to reproduce visual detection. However,
most of them inherited the main limitation of visual analysis:
visibility of a structure dependent on a local S/N ratio.
METHOD
A large and redundant family of waveforms, called timefrequency atoms, is generated by scaling, translating and
modulating a window function g(t):
1
t u it
gs, ,u(t)
g(
) e
(1)
s
s

s>0 is scale, - frequency modulation and u - translation.

The windowed Fourier transform and wavelet transform can
be considered as particular cases of MP corresponding to
restrictions concerning the choice of parameters.
In each step of an iterative procedure an atom giving the
largest product with the residuum left after previous iterations
is chosen. In this way a representation is adapted to the local
signal structures. The energy is conserved.
MP procedure was applied to 21 channels (10/20 system) of
second night EEG of 8 healthy subjects (sampling frequency
102.4 Hz). Gabor functions were used as basic waveforms, i.e.
the window function g in eq. (1) was Gauss. Such a choice
provides the best time-frequency resolution and corresponds
well to the shape of sleep spindles. EEG segments od 20 sec
length were decomposed. Sleep spindles were chosen from the
fitted atoms based upon their time-frequency features reported
in literature: frequency 11-15 Hz and time span 0.6 - 2.4 sec.
The problem of spindles amplitude threshold is still under
investigation; for the plot presented here it was set at 20 V.
RESULTS
Concordance of sleep spindles detection based upon MP
parameters with human judgment revealed that the number of
false positives increased for lower threshold amplitudes. This
is due to the fact that the MP representation is adapted to the
local signal structures, regardless of their visibility, which
depends on the on-going EEG. Some structures classified by
expert as one spindle were identified by MP as a superposition
of spindles with different frequencies. In the framework of
MP, discrimination of such structures is straightforward. This
problem was previously assessed by Hao et al [5], who
applied complex demodulation to visually scored sleep
spindles in order to resolve spindles partially overlapping in
time domain.
For 21 decomposed EEG channels detected spindles were
described in terms of position in time and frequency,
amplitude, and time span. Plots of spindles amplitudes and
density vs time confirmed their reciprocal relation to the slow
wave activity and absence of spindles of amplitude above
20 V in the REM sleep episodes.
Figure 1 presents each of detected spindles marked in the
frequency-amplitude coordinates for 8 out of 21 analyzed
derivations. Frequency distribution of spindles in recorded
EEG channels reveals the predominance of low-frequency
spindles in frontal and high-frequency spindles in posterior
derivations as postulated by [4]. The abundance of spindles in

temporal and occipital derivations was smaller than in the

other localizations.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Adaptivity of the MP representation allows precise detection
of transients even at relatively low S/N ratio, where the
visibility of the structures is poor. Most of the methods of
automatic sleep spindles detection, applied up to now, were
aimed at highest possible concordance with visual analysis.
MP allows a step beyond the limitations of visual analysis and
automatic methods aimed at imitating the human detection.
Several of the spatial and temporal characteristics of spindles
occurrence, postulated in literature and previously assessed by
means of various techniques, were confirmed based upon the
results of MP decomposition and automatic choice of
structures corresponding to sleep spindles and slow wave
activity.
MP overcomes limitations inherent to wavelet transform,
related to the fixed orthonormal basis. If offers a unique
possibility of non-stationary signals representation in timefrequency-energy coordinates and of identification and
parametrization of transients. We have demonstrated the
advantages of the method on the example of sleep spindles.
However, the application of MP-based techniques is by no
means limited to this type of structures. Work aimed at
complete description of sleep EEG based upon MP
decomposition is in progress.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by KBN grant 8T11E 01209.
We thank prof. W. Szelenberger from Warsaw Medical School
for providing the data and consultations.
REFERENCES
[1] Blinowska K.J., Durka P.J. "The Application of Wavelet
Transform and Matching Pursuit to the Time-Varying
EEG Signals", Intelligent Engineering Systems through
Artificial Neural Networks, Vol.4 Ed. Dagli, Fernandez,
Gosh, 1994 pp. 535-540
[2] Davis G. "Adaptive Nonlinear Approximations" a dissertation: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences,
New York University, September 1994
ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/wave/report/DissertationGDavis.ps.Z
[3] Mallat S.G., Zhang Z. "Matching Pursuit with TimeFrequency Dictionaries." IEEE Trans. Sign. Process.,
Vol. 41 pp. 3397-3415, 1993.
[4] Jobert M., Poiseau E., Jhning P., Schultz H., Kubicki S.
"Topographical Analysis of Sleep Spindle activity"
Neurobiology, Vol. 26, pp. 210-217, 1992.
[5] Hao Y.L., Ueda Y., Ishii N. "Improved procedure of
complex demodulation and an application to frequency
analysis of sleep spindles" Med.& Biol. Eng. & Comput.
Vol. 30, pp. 406-412, 1992.

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Figure 1 Sleep spindles plotted in the frequencyamplitude coordinates for 8 of the 21 derivations. x frequency, y - amplitude for each of the detected
spindles. Frontal derivations in the upper part.