Looking for a balance between visual and automatic sleep scoring

Sleep recordings are visually classified in stages by experts in the field, based on consensus international criteria. This procedure is expensive and time-consuming. Automatic sleep scoring systems have, progressively over the years, demonstrated good levels of accuracy. Although the performance of these algorithms is believed to be high, however, there remains widespread skepticism in their daily use in clinical and scientific practice. In this comment to a recent publication of NPJ Digital Medicine, we express the reasons why we think the sleep expert should remain the central pivot in the pendulum between visual and automatic methodology, trying to find a new balance in the scientific debate.