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Personalized supervised and unsupervised intracranial sleep decoding during deep brain stimulation
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  • Published: 22 January 2026

Personalized supervised and unsupervised intracranial sleep decoding during deep brain stimulation

  • Clay Smyth1,
  • Md Fahim Anjum2,
  • Jin-Xiao Zhang2,
  • Jiaang Yao1,
  • Reza Abbasi-Asl2,
  • Philip Starr3 na1 &
  • …
  • Simon Little2 na1 

npj Digital Medicine , Article number:  (2026) Cite this article

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We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.

Subjects

  • Biomedical engineering
  • Computational neuroscience
  • Data processing
  • Machine learning
  • Neurological disorders

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).

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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.

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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

Author notes
  1. These authors contributed equally: Philip Starr, Simon Little.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Bioengineering, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Clay Smyth & Jiaang Yao

  2. Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Md Fahim Anjum, Jin-Xiao Zhang, Reza Abbasi-Asl & Simon Little

  3. Department of Neurosurgery, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Philip Starr

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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

Correspondence to Clay Smyth.

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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.

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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

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  • Received: 26 February 2025

  • Accepted: 13 January 2026

  • Published: 22 January 2026

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-026-02368-0

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