DREAMS: Polysomnographic Recordings with Expert Annotations

During the DREAMS project, a collection of polysomnographic recordings was gathered from a sleep laboratory in a Belgium hospital. The data includes 20 recordings from healthy subjects, 27 from patients, and multiple expert-annotated databases for microevents like sleep spindles and apnea. The recordings were stored in the European Data Format (EDF) and published to facilitate research and algorithm comparison.

Use Cases

• Training sleep stage classifiers based on recordings annotated with Rechtschaffen and Kales and AASM criteria.
• Developing artifact detection models based on the database annotated with cardiac interference, muscle artifacts, and other noise types.
• Benchmarking algorithms for detecting sleep spindles or K-complexes using the independently annotated EEG excerpts.
• Building models to identify periodic limb movements or respiratory events like apnea from annotated patient recordings.

Strengths

• Includes multiple focused databases (e.g., 20 recordings for artifacts, 8 for sleep spindles) for specific research tasks.
• Annotations were performed by multiple experts for several event types, potentially allowing for inter-rater reliability studies.
• Recordings come from both healthy subjects and patients with various pathologies, providing clinical diversity.

Limitations

• A noted issue in the Sleep Spindles Database is that expert 1's spindle counts were cut off after 1000 seconds, complicating performance comparisons.
• Column-level documentation and sample data are unavailable, making field semantics and data structure unclear before download.
• The last update date, license, and total scale (rows, file size) are unknown, limiting suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Recordings were acquired in a sleep laboratory of a Belgium hospital using a MEDATEC BrainnetTM System polygraph.

Collection Method

Collected as part of the DREAMS project funded by Région Wallonne, with annotations performed by several experts.

Geography

Belgium