The Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies (MASS) is an open-access and collaborative database of laboratory-based polysomnography (PSG) recordings O’Reilly, C., et al. (2014) J Seep Res, 23(6):628-635. Its goal is to provide a standard and easily accessible source of data for benchmarking the various systems developed to help the automation of sleep analysis. It also provides a readily available source of data for fast validation of experimental results and for exploratory analyses. Finally, it is a shared resource that can be used to foster large-scale collaborations in sleep studies.

MASS is composed of cohorts themselves comprising subsets. Recordings within subsets is kept as homogeneous as possible, whereas it is more heterogeneous between subsets. To allow inter-study comparisons, researchers validating their results on MASS are encouraged to specify which portion of the database they used in their assessment (e.g., MASS-C1 for the whole cohort 1, MASS-C1/SS1-SS3 for subsets 1, 2 and 3 of cohort 1).

Currently, the first MASS cohort available is described in O’Reilly, C., et al. (2014) J Seep Res, 23(6):628-635. This cohort comprises polysomnograms of 200 complete nights recorded in 97 men and 103 women of age varying between 18 and 76 years (mean: 38.3 years, SD: 18.9 years). It has been split into five different subsets.