title: Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies: an open-access resource for instrument benchmarking and exploratory research.
abstract: Manual processing of sleep recordings is extremely time-consuming. Efforts to automate this process have shown promising results, but automatic systems are generally evaluated on private databases, not allowing accurate cross-validation with other systems. In lacking a common benchmark, the relative performances of different systems are not compared easily and advances are compromised. To address this fundamental methodological impediment to sleep study, we propose an open-access database of polysomnographic biosignals. To build this database, whole-night recordings from 200 participants [97 males (aged 42.9 ± 19.8 years) and 103 females (aged 38.3 ± 18.9 years); age range: 18-76 years] were pooled from eight different research protocols performed in three different hospital-based sleep laboratories. All recordings feature a sampling frequency of 256 Hz and an electroencephalography (EEG) montage of 4-20 channels plus standard electro-oculography (EOG), electromyography (EMG), electrocardiography (ECG) and respiratory signals. Access to the database can be obtained through the Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies (MASS) website (http://www.ceams-carsm.ca/en/MASS), and requires only affiliation with a research institution and prior approval by the applicant's local ethical review board. Providing the research community with access to this free and open sleep database is expected to facilitate the development and cross-validation of sleep analysis automation systems. It is also expected that such a shared resource will be a catalyst for cross-centre collaborations on difficult topics such as improving inter-rater agreement on sleep stage scoring.
authors.affiliation: Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine, Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada.|Département de Psychiatrie, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3149-4934
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: O'Reilly
authors.affiliation: Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine, Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada.|Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Nadia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Gosselin
authors.affiliation: Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine, Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada.|Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Carrier
authors.affiliation: Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine, Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada.|Département de Psychiatrie, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Tore
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nielsen
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001109:Archives; D001331:Automation; D019985:Benchmarking / Q000379:methods*; D035843:Biomedical Research; D015331:Cohort Studies; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004562:Electrocardiography; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004576:Electromyography; D004585:Electrooculography; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D017286:Polysomnography / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012119:Respiration; D012890:Sleep / Q000502:physiology; D012894:Sleep Stages / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: collaboration tool; methodology; open-data; reproducibility