On Sleep-Wake Disorder Identification from Polysomnographic Representations

Alvise Dei Rossi, Luigi Fiorillo, Giuliana Monachino, Alessia Calzoni, Julia van der Meer +4

Self-supervised polysomnography foundation models (PSG FMs) aim to capture clinically useful information beyond sleep staging, yet are rarely compared with sleep-staging encoders pretrained at comparable scale and modality coverage. Using a common whole-night, missingness-aware state-space downstream modeling framework, we compared frozen representations from prominent large-scale, multi-cohort sleep-stage-supervised encoders and self-supervised PSG FMs for multilabel identification of six sleep-wake and circadian disorder groups in 7,906 PSGs from an unseen registry. Although PSG FMs outperformed an EEG-only, single-cohort supervised baseline, this ordering reversed when supervised pretraining approached comparable scale and modality coverage. Transfer learning from neural sleep scorers achieved higher overall performance while exhibiting greater downstream data efficiency. These findings underscore the need for scale- and modality-matched pretrained supervised baselines when assessing PSG FMs' downstream potential.