A Comparison of Spindle Activity Measurements: Automated Spindle Detection Helps Distinguish Changes in Spindle Activity

Study Objectives. Sleep spindle activity is commonly estimated by measuring sigma power during stage 2 non-rapid eye movement (NREM2) sleep. However, spindles account for little of the total NREM2 interval and therefore sigma power over the entire interval may be misleading. This study compares derived spindle measures from direct automated spindle detection with those from gross power spectral analyses for the purposes of clinical trial design. Methods. We estimated spindle activity in a set of 8,440 overnight electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings from 5,793 patients from the Sleep Heart Health Study using both sigma power and direct automated spindle detection. Performance of the two methods was evaluated by ability to distinguish NREM2 from other NREM sleep stages and by determining the sample size required to detect decline in age-related spindle coherence with each method in a simulated clinical trial. Results. Mean sigma power in NREM2 was indistinguishable from other NREM states in 25% of recordings, vs only 7% for direct spindle measurement (P < 0.001). These percentages were 34% and 14% respectively for sigma coherence comparisons. In a simulated clinical trial, sigma power required a sample size of 115 to achieve 95% power to identify age-related changes in sigma coherence, while automated spindle detection required a sample size of only 60. Conclusions. Measurements of spindle activity utilizing automated spindle detection outperformed conventional sigma power analysis by a wide margin, suggesting that many studies would benefit from incorporation of automated spindle detection. These results further suggest that some previous studies which have failed to detect changes in sigma power or coherence may have failed simply because they were underpowered.