Microsleep assessment enhances interpretation of the Maintenance of Wakefulness Test

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

“…In this way, pioneering works explored the genetic link to narcolepsy [34] and the role of orexin in narcolepsy [40]. Moreover, the link between sleepiness and circadian rhythms [13] and homeostatic pressure [1,66], have provided experimental evidence to the Borbélys' model of interplay between homeostatic processes and circadian rhythm that was theorized as early as 1982 [10] [30], the microstate analysis during MWT [5,16], or the study of stage transitions [17,35] represent metrics closely related to neurophysiology that can be extracted from electrophysiological signals already measured in sleep clinics, in order to investigate brain mechanisms related to sleepiness.…”

Epidemiology, Physiology and Clinical Approach to Sleepiness at the Wheel in OSA Patients: A Narrative Review

“…However, in addition to sleep latency, which is the main result of the MWT, very short episodes of sleep during MWT could be more sensitive markers of the risk to experience car accidents by reflecting drowsiness, i.e., the intermediate state between wakefulness and established sleep. Drowsiness preceding sleep is associated with a lack of control and may be a crucial determinant of car accidents [69][70][71][72]. The automatic identification of microsleep episodes may be the first step to develop a new clinical test to identify risky drivers [73].…”