Machine and Deep Learning in Molecular and Genetic Aspects of Sleep Research.

Journal: Neurotherapeutics : the journal of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics
PMID:

Abstract

Epidemiological sleep research strives to identify the interactions and causal mechanisms by which sleep affects human health, and to design intervention strategies for improving sleep throughout the lifespan. These goals can be advanced by further focusing on the environmental and genetic etiology of sleep disorders, and by development of risk stratification algorithms, to identify people who are at risk or are affected by, sleep disorders. These studies rely on comprehensive sleep-related data which often contains complex multi-dimensional physiological and molecular measurements across multiple timepoints. Thus, sleep research is well-suited for the application of computational approaches that can handle high-dimensional data. Here, we survey recent advances in machine and deep learning together with the availability of large human cohort studies with sleep data that can jointly drive the next breakthroughs in the sleep-research field. We describe sleep-related data types and datasets, and present some of the tasks in the field that can be targets for algorithmic approaches, as well as the challenges and opportunities in pursuing them.

Authors

  • Michael Elgart
    Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA. melgart@bwh.harvard.edu.
  • Susan Redline
    Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University Boston, MA.
  • Tamar Sofer
    Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.