AFSleepNet: Attention-Based Multi-View Feature Fusion Framework for Pediatric Sleep Staging

The widespread prevalence of sleep problems in children highlights the importance of timely and accurate sleep staging in the diagnosis and treatment of pediatric sleep disorders. However, most existing sleep staging methods rely on one-dimensional raw polysomnograms or two-dimensional spectrograms, which omit critical details due to single-view processing. This shortcoming is particularly apparent in pediatric sleep staging, where the lack of a specialized network fails to meet the needs of precision medicine. Therefore, we introduce AFSleepNet, a novel attention-based multi-view feature fusion network tailored for pediatric sleep analysis. The model utilizes multimodal data (EEG, EOG, EMG), combining one-dimensional convolutional neural networks to extract time-invariant features and bidirectional-long-short-term memory to learn the transition rules among sleep stages, as well as employing short-time Fourier transform to generate two-dimensional spectral maps. This network employs a fusion method with self-attention mechanism and innovative pre-training strategy. This strategy can maintain the feature extraction capabilities of AFSleepNet from different views, enhancing the robustness of the multi-view model while effectively preventing model overfitting, thereby achieving efficient and accurate automatic sleep stage analysis. A “leave-one-subject-out” cross-validation on CHAT and clinical datasets demonstrated the excellent performance of AFSleepNet, with mean accuracies of 87.5% and 88.1%, respectively. Superiority over existing methods improves the accuracy and reliability of pediatric sleep staging.