Young-Seok Kweon

Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin, Heon-Gyu Kwak et al.

Polysomnography (PSG) is an indispensable diagnostic tool in sleep medicine, essential for identifying various sleep disorders. By capturing physiological signals, including EEG, EOG, EMG, and cardiorespiratory metrics, PSG presents a patient's sleep architecture. However, its dependency on complex equipment and expertise confines its use to specialized clinical settings. Addressing these limitations, our study aims to perform PSG by developing a system that requires only a single EEG measurement. We propose a novel system capable of reconstructing multi-signal PSG from a single-channel EEG based on a masked autoencoder. The masked autoencoder was trained and evaluated using the Sleep-EDF-20 dataset, with mean squared error as the metric for assessing the similarity between original and reconstructed signals. The model demonstrated proficiency in reconstructing multi-signal data. Our results present promise for the development of more accessible and long-term sleep monitoring systems. This suggests the expansion of PSG's applicability, enabling its use beyond the confines of clinics.

Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin, Heon-Gyu Kwak

Sleep is an essential behavior to prevent the decrement of cognitive, motor, and emotional performance and various diseases. However, it is not easy to fall asleep when people want to sleep. There are various sleep-disturbing factors such as the COVID-19 situation, noise from outside, and light during the night. We aim to develop a personalized sleep induction system based on mental states using electroencephalogram and auditory stimulation. Our system analyzes users' mental states using an electroencephalogram and results of the Pittsburgh sleep quality index and Brunel mood scale. According to mental states, the system plays sleep induction sound among five auditory stimulation: white noise, repetitive beep sounds, rainy sound, binaural beat, and sham sound. Finally, the sleep-inducing system classified the sleep stage of participants with 94.7 percent and stopped auditory stimulation if participants showed non-rapid eye movement sleep. Our system makes 18 participants fall asleep among 20 participants.

Jun-Young Kim, Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin et al.

Adaptive reasoning enables humans to flexibly adjust inference strategies when environmental rules or contexts change, yet its underlying neural dynamics remain unclear. This study investigated the neurophysiological mechanisms of adaptive reasoning using a card-sorting paradigm combined with electroencephalography and compared human performance with that of a multimodal large language model. Stimulus- and feedback-locked analyses revealed coordinated delta-theta-alpha dynamics: early delta-theta activity reflected exploratory monitoring and rule inference, whereas occipital alpha engagement indicated confirmatory stabilization of attention after successful rule identification. In contrast, the multimodal large language model exhibited only short-term feedback-driven adjustments without hierarchical rule abstraction or genuine adaptive reasoning. These findings identify the neural signatures of human adaptive reasoning and highlight the need for brain-inspired artificial intelligence that incorporates oscillatory feedback coordination for true context-sensitive adaptation.

Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin, Ji-Yong Kim et al.

Conscious state estimation is important in various medical settings, including sleep staging and anesthesia management, to ensure patient safety and optimize health outcomes. Traditional methods predominantly utilize electroencephalography (EEG), which faces challenges such as high sensitivity to noise and the requirement for controlled environments. In this study, we propose the consciousness-ECG transformer that leverages electrocardiography (ECG) signals for non-invasive and reliable conscious state estimation. Our approach employs a transformer with decoupled query attention to effectively capture heart rate variability features that distinguish between conscious and unconscious states. We implemented the conscious state estimation system with real-time monitoring and validated our system on datasets involving sleep staging and anesthesia level monitoring during surgeries. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms baseline models, achieving accuracies of 0.877 on sleep staging and 0.880 on anesthesia level monitoring. Moreover, our model achieves the highest area under curve values of 0.786 and 0.895 on sleep staging and anesthesia level monitoring, respectively. The proposed system offers a practical and robust alternative to EEG-based methods, particularly suited for dynamic clinical environments. Our results highlight the potential of ECG-based consciousness monitoring to enhance patient safety and advance our understanding of conscious states.

Heon-Gyu Kwak, Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin

In this paper, we propose a Siamese sleep transformer (SST) that effectively extracts features from single-channel raw electroencephalogram signals for robust sleep stage scoring. Despite the significant advances in sleep stage scoring in the last few years, most of them mainly focused on the increment of model performance. However, other problems still exist: the bias of labels in datasets and the instability of model performance by repetitive training. To alleviate these problems, we propose the SST, a novel sleep stage scoring model with a selective batch sampling strategy and self-knowledge distillation. To evaluate how robust the model was to the bias of labels, we used different datasets for training and testing: the sleep heart health study and the Sleep-EDF datasets. In this condition, the SST showed competitive performance in sleep stage scoring. In addition, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the selective batch sampling strategy with a reduction of the standard deviation of performance by repetitive training. These results could show that SST extracted effective learning features against the bias of labels in datasets, and the selective batch sampling strategy worked for the model robustness in training.

Gi-Hwan Shin, Young-Seok Kweon

Many studies have discussed the difference in brain activity related to encoding and retrieval of working memory (WM) tasks. However, it remains unclear if there is a change in brain activation associated with re-encoding. The main objective of this study was to compare different brain states (rest, encoding, and re-encoding) during the WM task. We recorded brain activity from thirty-seven participants using an electroencephalogram and calculated power spectral density (PSD) and phase-locking value (PLV) for different frequencies. In addition, the difference in phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) between encoding and re-encoding was investigated. Our results showed that alpha PSD decreased as the learning progressed, and theta PLV, beta PLV, and gamma PLV showed differences between brain regions. Also, there was a statistically significant difference in PAC. These findings suggest the possibility of improving the efficiency of learning during re-encoding by understanding the differences in neural correlation related to learning.

Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin

Sleep has a significant role to maintain our health. However, people have struggled with sleep induction because of noise, emotion, and complicated thoughts. We hypothesized that there was more effective auditory stimulation to induce sleep based on their mental states. We investigated five auditory stimulation: sham, repetitive beep, binaural beat, white noise, and rainy sounds. The Pittsburgh sleep quality index was performed to divide subjects into good and poor sleep groups. To verify the subject's mental states between initiation of sessions, a psychomotor vigilance task and Stanford sleepiness scale (SSS) were performed before auditory stimulation. After auditory stimulation, we asked subjects to report their sleep experience during auditory stimulation. We also calculated alpha dominant duration that was the period that represents the wake period during stimulation. We showed that there were no differences in reaction time and SSS between sessions. It indicated sleep experience is not related to the timeline. The good sleep group fell asleep more frequently than the poor sleep group when they hear white noise and rainy sounds. Moreover, when subjects failed to fall asleep during sham, most subjects fell asleep during rainy sound (Cohen's kappa: -0.588). These results help people to select suitable auditory stimulation to induce sleep based on their mental states.

Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin, Heon-Gyu Kwak et al.

A micro-sleep is a short sleep that lasts from 1 to 30 secs. Its detection during driving is crucial to prevent accidents that could claim a lot of people's lives. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is suitable to detect micro-sleep because EEG was associated with consciousness and sleep. Deep learning showed great performance in recognizing brain states, but sufficient data should be needed. However, collecting micro-sleep data during driving is inefficient and has a high risk of obtaining poor data quality due to noisy driving situations. Night-sleep data at home is easier to collect than micro-sleep data during driving. Therefore, we proposed a deep learning approach using night-sleep EEG to improve the performance of micro-sleep detection. We pre-trained the U-Net to classify the 5-class sleep stages using night-sleep EEG and used the sleep stages estimated by the U-Net to detect micro-sleep during driving. This improved micro-sleep detection performance by about 30\% compared to the traditional approach. Our approach was based on the hypothesis that micro-sleep corresponds to the early stage of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. We analyzed EEG distribution during night-sleep and micro-sleep and found that micro-sleep has a similar distribution to NREM sleep. Our results provide the possibility of similarity between micro-sleep and the early stage of NREM sleep and help prevent micro-sleep during driving.

Gi-Hwan Shin, Young-Seok Kweon, Minji Lee

Memory is an essential element in people's daily life based on experience. So far, many studies have analyzed electroencephalogram (EEG) signals at encoding to predict later remembered items, but few studies have predicted long-term memory only with EEG signals of successful short-term memory. Therefore, we aim to predict long-term memory using deep neural networks. In specific, the spectral power of the EEG signals of remembered items in short-term memory was calculated and inputted to the multilayer perceptron (MLP) and convolutional neural network (CNN) classifiers to predict long-term memory. Seventeen participants performed visuo-spatial memory task consisting of picture and location memory in the order of encoding, immediate retrieval (short-term memory), and delayed retrieval (long-term memory). We applied leave-one-subject-out cross-validation to evaluate the predictive models. As a result, the picture memory showed the highest kappa-value of 0.19 on CNN, and location memory showed the highest kappa-value of 0.32 in MLP. These results showed that long-term memory can be predicted with measured EEG signals during short-term memory, which improves learning efficiency and helps people with memory and cognitive impairments.