Sleepiness should be reinvestigated through the lens of clinical neurophysiology: A mixed expertal and big-data Natural Language Processing approach

Vincent P. Martin, Christophe Gauld, Jacques Taillard, Laure Peter-Derex, Régis Lopez, Jean Arthur Micoulaud-Franchi*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Historically, the field of sleep medicine has revolved around electrophysiological tools. However, the use of these tools as a neurophysiological method of investigation seems to be underrepresented today, from both international recommendations and sleep centers, in contrast to behavioral and psychometric tools. The aim of this article is to combine a data-driven approach and neurophysiological and sleep medicine expertise to confirm or refute the hypothesis that neurophysiology has declined in favor of behavioral or self-reported dimensions in sleep medicine for the investigation of sleepiness, despite the use of electrophysiological tools. Using Natural Language Processing methods, we analyzed the abstracts of the 18,370 articles indexed by PubMed containing the terms ‘sleepiness’ or ‘sleepy’ in the title, abstract, or keywords. For this purpose, we examined these abstracts using two methods: a lexical network, enabling the identification of concepts (neurophysiological or clinical) related to sleepiness in these articles and their interconnections; furthermore, we analyzed the temporal evolution of these concepts to extract historical trends. These results confirm the hypothesis that neurophysiology has declined in favor of behavioral or self-reported dimensions in sleep medicine for the investigation of sleepiness. In order to bring sleepiness measurements closer to brain functioning and to reintroduce neurophysiology into sleep medicine, we discuss two strategies: the first is reanalyzing electrophysiological signals collected during the standard sleep electrophysiological test; the second takes advantage of the current trend towards dimensional models of sleepiness to situate clinical neurophysiology at the heart of the redefinition of sleepiness.

Original languageEnglish
Article number102937
JournalNeurophysiologie Clinique
Volume54
Issue number2
Early online date23 Feb 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2024

Keywords

  • Natural language processing
  • Neurophysiology
  • Sleep medicine
  • Sleepiness
  • Text mining

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