Abstract
Impaired sleep in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a significant unmet need. Targeting sleep stage-specific neurophysiologies with adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation (aDBS) may ameliorate sleep disruption. This study analyzes the efficacy of personalized machine learning approaches on classifying sleep stages from participants receiving deep brain stimulation. We acquired 283 hours of multi-night intracranial cortico-basal recordings with synchronized sleep stage labels derived from scalp EEG across 5 participants during chronic stimulation. Five-stage classification accuracy across PD subjects averaged 80.2% (±0.9% SEM). When constraining sleep classification to algorithms implementable in currently available DBS devices, e.g., binary NREM classification using linear models, an average accuracy of 85.9% (±0.4% SEM) was achieved for PD subjects. Additionally, linear models trained on unsupervised cluster labels achieved an average accuracy of 83.5% (±5.6% SEM) when discriminating NREM sleep. Overall, this demonstrates the feasibility of personalized supervised and unsupervised ML models for sleep classification using intracranial data during stimulation. The Institutional Review Board approved the parent study protocol, and the study was registered on clinicaltrials.gov (NCT0358289; IDE G180097).
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to Personal Health Information reasons, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Code availability
The underlying code for this study, and training/validation datasets, is not publicly available but may be made available to qualified researchers on reasonable request from the corresponding author.
References
Chaudhuri, K. R., Healy, D. G., Schapira, A. H. V. & National Institute for Clinical Excellence. Non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease: diagnosis and management. Lancet Neurol. 5, 235–245 (2006).
Diederich, N. J., Vaillant, M., Mancuso, G., Lyen, P. & Tiete, J. Progressive sleep ‘destructuring’ in Parkinson’s disease. A polysomnographic study in 46 patients. Sleep. Med 6, 313–318 (2005).
Videnovic, A. & Högl, B. Disorders of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms in Parkinson’s Disease (Springer, 2015).
Weintraub, D. et al. The neuropsychiatry of Parkinson’s disease: advances and challenges. Lancet Neurol. 21, 89–102 (2022).
Berry, R. B. et al. The AASM Manual for the Scoring of Sleep and Associated Events: Rules, Terminology and Technical Specifications (American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 2020).
Zahed, H. et al. The neurophysiology of sleep in Parkinson’s disease. Mov. Disord. 36, 1526–1542 (2021).
Martinez-Martin, P., Rodriguez-Blazquez, C., Kurtis, M. M., Chaudhuri, K. R. & NMSS Validation Group. The impact of non-motor symptoms on health-related quality of life of patients with Parkinson’s disease. Mov. Disord. 26, 399–406 (2011).
Barone, P. et al. The PRIAMO study: a multicenter assessment of nonmotor symptoms and their impact on quality of life in Parkinson’s disease. Mov. Disord. 24, 1641–1649 (2009).
Schreiner, S. J. et al. Slow-wave sleep and motor progression in Parkinson's disease. Ann. Neurol 85, 765–770, https://doi.org/10.1002/ana.25459 (2019).
Chen, J. et al. Correlation of slow-wave sleep with motor and nonmotor progression in Parkinson’s disease. Ann. Clin. Transl. Neurol. 11, 554–563 (2024).
Bassetti, C. L. et al. Neurology and psychiatry: waking up to opportunities of sleep. : State of the art and clinical/research priorities for the next decade. Eur. J. Neurol. 22, 1337–1354 (2015).
Mantovani, S., Smith, S. S., Gordon, R. & O’Sullivan, J. D. An overview of sleep and circadian dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease. J. Sleep. Res. 27, e12673 (2018).
Xie, L. et al. Sleep drives metabolite clearance from the adult brain. Science 342, 373–377 (2013).
Klinzing, J. G., Niethard, N. & Born, J. Mechanisms of systems memory consolidation during sleep. Nat. Neurosci. 22, 1598–1610 (2019).
Deane, K. H. O. et al. Priority setting partnership to identify the top 10 research priorities for the management of Parkinson’s disease. BMJ Open 4, e006434 (2014).
Zuzuárregui, J. R. P. & Ostrem, J. L. The impact of deep brain stimulation on sleep in Parkinson’s disease: an update. J. Parkinsons Dis. 10, 393–404 (2020).
Mizrahi-Kliger, A. D., Kaplan, A., Israel, Z., Deffains, M. & Bergman, H. Basal ganglia beta oscillations during sleep underlie Parkinsonian insomnia. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 117, 17359–17368 (2020).
Anjum, M. F. et al. Multi-night cortico-basal recordings reveal mechanisms of NREM slow-wave suppression and spontaneous awakenings in Parkinson’s disease. Nat. Commun. 15, 1793 (2024).
Baumann-Vogel, H. et al. The impact of subthalamic deep brain stimulation on sleep–wake behavior: a prospective electrophysiological study in 50 parkinson patients. Sleep 40, zsx033 (2017).
Deuschl, G. et al. A randomized trial of deep-brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease. N. Engl. J. Med. 355, 896–908 (2006).
Smyth, C. et al. Adaptive deep brain stimulation for sleep stage targeting in Parkinson’s disease. Brain Stimul. 16, 1292–1296 (2023).
Little, S. et al. Adaptive deep brain stimulation in advanced Parkinson's disease. Ann. Neurol. 74, 449–457 (2013).
Gilron, R. et al. Long-term wireless streaming of neural recordings for circuit discovery and adaptive stimulation in individuals with Parkinson’s disease. Nat. Biotechnol. 39, 1078–1085 (2021).
Oehrn, C. R. et al. Chronic adaptive deep brain stimulation versus conventional stimulation in Parkinson’s disease: a blinded randomized feasibility trial. Nat. Med. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03196-z (2024).
Velisar, A. et al. Dual threshold neural closed loop deep brain stimulation in Parkinson's disease patients. Brain Stimul. 12, 868–876 (2019).
Carver, K. et al. Towards automated sleep-stage classification for adaptive deep brain stimulation targeting sleep in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Commun. Eng. 2, 1–12 (2023).
Chen, Y. et al. Automatic sleep stage classification based on subthalamic local field potentials. IEEE Trans. Neural Syst. Rehabil. Eng. 27, 118–128 (2019).
Baumgartner, A. J. et al. Basal ganglia local field potentials as a potential biomarker for sleep disturbance in Parkinson’s disease. Front. Neurol. 12, 765203 (2021).
Yin, Z. et al. Generalized sleep decoding with basal ganglia signals in multiple movement disorders. npj Digit. Med. 7, 122 (2024).
Thompson, J. A. et al. Sleep patterns in Parkinson’s disease: direct recordings from the subthalamic nucleus. J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 89, 95–104 (2018).
Christensen, E., Abosch, A., Thompson, J. A. & Zylberberg, J. Inferring sleep stage from local field potentials recorded in the subthalamic nucleus of Parkinson’s patients. J. Sleep. Res. 28, e12806 (2019).
Stanslaski, S. et al. Sensing data and methodology from the Adaptive DBS Algorithm for Personalized Therapy in Parkinson’s Disease (ADAPT-PD) clinical trial. npj Parkinsons Dis. 10, 174 (2024).
Stanslaski, S. et al. A chronically implantable neural coprocessor for investigating the treatment of neurological disorders. IEEE Trans. Biomed. Circuits Syst. 12, 1230–1245 (2018).
Cusinato, R. et al. Workflow for the unsupervised clustering of sleep stages identifies light and deep sleep in electrophysiological recordings in mice. J. Neurosci. Methods 408, 110155 (2024).
Williams, N. R., Foote, K. D. & Okun, M. S. STN vs. GPi deep brain stimulation: Translating the rematch into clinical practice. Mov. Disord. Clin. Pract. 1, 24–35 (2014).
Olaru, M. et al. Motor network gamma oscillations in chronic home recordings predict dyskinesia in Parkinson’s disease. Brain https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awae004 (2024).
Arnal, P. J. et al. The Dreem Headband compared to polysomnography for electroencephalographic signal acquisition and sleep staging. Sleep 43, zsaa097 (2020).
Gross, D. W. & Gotman, J. Correlation of high-frequency oscillations with the sleep–wake cycle and cognitive activity in humans. Neuroscience 94, 1005–1018 (1999).
Eldele, E. et al. An attention-based deep learning approach for sleep stage classification with single-channel EEG. IEEE Trans. Neural Syst. Rehabil. Eng. 29, 809–818 (2021).
Léger, D. et al. Slow-wave sleep: from the cell to the clinic. Sleep. Med. Rev. 41, 113–132 (2018).
James, G., Witten, D., Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R. & Taylor, J. An Introduction to Statistical Learning (Springer International Publishing, 2024).
Sri, T. R. et al. A systematic review on deep learning models for sleep stage classification. In Proc. 6th International Conference on Trends in Electronics and Informatics (ICOEI) (IEEE, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1109/icoei53556.2022.9776965.
Bentéjac, C., Csörgő, A. & Martínez-Muñoz, G. A comparative analysis of gradient boosting algorithms. Artif. Intell. Rev. 54, 1937–1967 (2021).
Borisov, V. et al. Deep neural networks and tabular data: a survey. IEEE Trans Neural Netw. Learn Syst. 35, 7499–7519 (2022).
Sekkal, R. N., Bereksi-Reguig, F., Ruiz-Fernandez, D., Dib, N. & Sekkal, S. Automatic sleep stage classification: from classical machine learning methods to deep learning. Biomed. Signal. Process. Control 77, 103751 (2022).
Kühn, A. A. et al. High-frequency stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus suppresses oscillatory beta activity in patients with Parkinson’s disease in parallel with improvement in motor performance. J. Neurosci. 28, 6165–6173 (2008).
Sermon, J. J. et al. Sub-harmonic entrainment of cortical gamma oscillations to deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease: model based predictions and validation in three human subjects. Brain Stimul. 16, 1412–1424 (2023).
Cagle, J. N. et al. Chronic intracranial recordings in the globus pallidus reveal circadian rhythms in Parkinson’s disease. Nat. Commun. 15, 4602 (2024).
Neumann, W.-J. et al. A localized pallidal physiomarker in cervical dystonia. Ann. Neurol. 82, 912–924 (2017).
Ravindran, KKG., Monica, CD., Atzori, G., Nilforooshan, R. & Hassanin, H. et al. Evaluation of Dreem headband for sleep staging and EEG spectral analysis in people living with Alzheimer's and older adults. Sleep 48, zsaf122, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsaf122 (2025).
Ke, G. et al. LightGBM: a highly efficient gradient boosting decision tree. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 9, 3146–3154 (2017).
Welch, P. The use of fast Fourier transform for the estimation of power spectra: a method based on time averaging over short, modified periodograms. IEEE Trans. Audio Electroacoust. 15, 70–73 (1967).
Chawla, N. V., Bowyer, K. W., Hall, L. O. & Kegelmeyer, W. P. SMOTE: synthetic minority over-sampling technique. Jair 16, 321–357 (2002).
Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I. & Hinton, G. E. ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. Commun. ACM 60, 84–90 (2012).
Lawhern, V. J. et al. EEGNet: a compact convolutional neural network for EEG-based brain–computer interfaces. J. Neural Eng. 15, 056013 (2018).
Metzger, S. L. et al. Generalizable spelling using a speech neuroprosthesis in an individual with severe limb and vocal paralysis. Nat. Commun. 13, 6510 (2022).
Lashgari, E., Liang, D. & Maoz, U. Data augmentation for deep-learning-based electroencephalography. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/jm2xu (2020).
Reynolds, D. Gaussian mixture models. in Encyclopedia of Biometrics 659–663 (Springer, 2009).
Ramaswamy, S., Rastogi, R. & Shim, K. Efficient algorithms for mining outliers from large data sets. In Proc. 2000 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data https://doi.org/10.1145/342009.335437 (ACM, 2000).
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our participants for their time and energy invested in this study. This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health UG3NS140730 and R01NS131405. The funder played no role in study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of data, or the writing of this manuscript. We extend gratitude to Medtronic for providing the Summit RC+S system used in this study at no cost.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
C.S. performed hypothesis generation, data collection, conducted analyses, and manuscript writing. M.F.A., J.X.Z., J.Y., and R.A.A. all provided intellectual contributions. J.Y. also contributed to analyses. P.S. performed surgical operations, provided intellectual contributions, and assisted in manuscript writing. S.L. contributed to hypothesis generation, oversight of data collection, intellectual contributions on analysis, and manuscript writing.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
S.L. consults for Iota Biosciences, but declares no non-financial competing interests. All other authors declare no financial or non-financial competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Smyth, C., Anjum, M.F., Zhang, JX. et al. Personalized supervised and unsupervised intracranial sleep decoding during deep brain stimulation. npj Digit. Med. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-026-02368-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-026-02368-0


