The DYNAM-O Toolbox: Characterizing Individualized Neural Signatures in Sleep EEG

The Dynamic Oscillation (DYNAM-O) Toolbox is an open-source software package designed for data-driven analysis of individualized neural dynamics in sleep EEG. This tool distinguishes transient oscillations as time-frequency peaks on multitaper spectrograms using a multi-resolution procedure. It then calculates intrinsic and sleep-state-dependent extrinsic features for each event and represents overnight distributions of tens of thousands of time-frequency peaks as feature histograms.

These histograms span oscillation frequency, slow oscillation power, and slow oscillation phase, preserving continuous brain-state variation that may be overlooked when averaging within conventional sleep stages.

The DYNAM-O Toolbox also includes tools for dimensionality reduction using Gaussian and spline basis, visualization, and statistical testing of whole histograms to support both exploratory and hypothesis-driven analyses. Its capabilities were demonstrated in a study analyzing overnight C3-channel EEG from 133 adults, including 71 females and 72 males aged 20-35 years, from the Cleveland Family Study.

The analysis confirmed higher center frequency of fast-spindle activity in females and uncovered greater low-alpha transient oscillatory activity in females, a pattern outside the conventional sleep spindle range. By integrating the entire analysis cycle from time-frequency peak extraction to statistical inference, the DYNAM-O Toolbox offers an accessible and interpretable framework for investigating individualized sleep physiology and identifying subtle, reproducible electrophysiological patterns.