Beyond the Spindle: Transient Oscillations in the Sleep EEG
Channel: Prerau Lab
Date: 2022-10-19

The brain is highly active during sleep, which makes it an important, natural way to study neurological health and disease. Scientists typically study brain activity during sleep using the electroencephalogram, or EEG, which measures brainwaves at the scalp. Starting in the mid 1930s, the sleep EEG was first studied by looking at the traces of brainwaves drawn on a paper tape by a machine. Many important features of sleep are still based on what people almost a century ago could most easily observe in the complex waveform traces. Even the latest machine learning and signal processing algorithms for detecting sleep waveforms are judged against their ability to recreate human observation.

In this talk from Harvard Medical School Sleep Grand Rounds,  Dr. Prerau discusses recent innovations in the way we think about transient, sleep spindle-like events in the sleep EEG. Dr. Prerau and a team of researchers from BWH, MGH, and BIDMC devised a new method that extracts tens of thousands of electrical events from the brainwaves of a sleeping person. Information from these waveforms is then used to create a picture of brain activity that seems to act like a fingerprint — unique for each person and consistent from one night to the next. The researchers then compared the activity between the healthy subjects and a population of people with schizophrenia, finding new potential EEG biomarkers of schizophrenia that could be useful in better understanding the mechanisms of the disorder and in the development of targeted treatments. 

More info can be found at http://sleepEEG.org