Sleep: An Open-Source Python Software for Visualization, Analysis, and Staging of Sleep Data

Abstract

We introduce Sleep, a new Python open-source graphical user interface (GUI) dedicated to visualization, scoring and analyses of sleep data. Among its most prominent features are: (1) Dynamic display of polysomnographic data, spectrogram, hypnogram and topographic maps with several customizable parameters, (2) Implementation of several automatic detection of sleep features such as spindles, K-complexes, slow waves, and rapid eye movements (REM), (3) Implementation of practical signal processing tools such as re-referencing or filtering, and (4) Display of main descriptive statistics including publication-ready tables and figures. The software package supports loading and reading raw EEG data from standard file formats such as European Data Format, in addition to a range of commercial data formats. Most importantly, Sleep is built on top of the VisPy library, which provides GPU-based fast and high-level visualization. As a result, it is capable of efficiently handling and displaying large sleep datasets. Sleep is freely available (http://visbrain.org/sleep) and comes with sample datasets and an extensive documentation. Novel functionalities will continue to be added and open-science community efforts are expected to enhance the capacities of this module.