A unifying Bayesian approach for preterm brain-age prediction that models EEG sleep transitions over age

Abstract: Preterm newborns undergo various stresses that may materialize as learning problems at school-age. Sleep staging of the Electroencephalogram (EEG), followed by prediction of their brain-age from these sleep states can quantify deviations from normal brain development early (when compared to the known age). Current automation of this approach relies on explicit sleep state classification, optimizing algorithms using clinician visually labelled sleep stages, which remains a subjective gold-standard. Such models fail to perform consistently over a wide age range and impacts the subsequent brain-age estimates that could prevent identification of subtler developmental deviations. We introduce a Bayesian Network utilizing multiple Gaussian Mixture Models, as a novel, unified approach for directly estimating brain-age, simultaneously modelling for both age and sleep dependencies on the EEG, to improve the accuracy of prediction over a wider age range.