JBHI Journal 2025 Journal Article
MHFNet: A Multimodal Hybrid-Embedding Fusion Network for Automatic Sleep Staging
- Ruhan Liu
- Jiajia Li
- Yang Wen
- Xian Huang
- Bin Sheng
- David Dagan Feng
- Ping Zhang
Scoring sleep stages is essential for evaluating the status of sleep continuity and comprehending its structure. Despite previous attempts, automating sleep scoring remains challenging. First, most existing works did not fuse local and global temporal information. Second, the correlation for special waves in different signals is rarely used in sleep staging modeling. Third, the logic of scoring rules based on adjacent epochs is not considered in developing sleep staging models. This paper introduces a multimodal hybrid-embedding fusion network (MHFNet), which aims to tackle these challenges in automating sleep stage scoring. MHFNet comprises multi-stream Xception blocks to extract wave characteristics, a hybrid time-embedding module to combine local and global temporal information, a dual-path gate transformer to fuse and enhance attention features, and a refined output header to reconstruct sleep scoring. We perform experiments using three publicly available datasets (SleepEDF-ST, SleepEDF-SC, and SHHS). Experimental results indicate the superiority of MHFNet over baseline approaches in cross-validation. Moreover, at the individual level, MHFNet yielded an average $R^{2}$ score improvement of 9 $\%$ in the testing dataset compared to state-of-the-art models, paving the way for its applications in real-world sleep medicine.