  Sleep studies are important for diagnosing sleep disorders such as insomnia,
narcolepsy or sleep apnea. They rely on manual scoring of sleep stages from raw
polisomnography signals, which is a tedious visual task requiring the workload
of highly trained professionals. Consequently, research efforts to purse for an
automatic stage scoring based on machine learning techniques have been carried
out over the last years. In this work, we resort to multitaper spectral
analysis to create visually interpretable images of sleep patterns from EEG
signals as inputs to a deep convolutional network trained to solve visual
recognition tasks. As a working example of transfer learning, a system able to
accurately classify sleep stages in new unseen patients is presented.
Evaluations in a widely-used publicly available dataset favourably compare to
state-of-the-art results, while providing a framework for visual interpretation
of outcomes.
