PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD It’s a very real problem for millions—sleep apnea. Characterized by extended pauses in breathing during the sleep cycle, it can be both disturbing and serious. Unfortunately, both the diagnostic process and treatments have been difficult to this point. Less invasive methods, though, may be just over the horizon.
Ioannis Pavlidis and Dr. Jayasimha N. Murthy, of the University of Houston and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, respectively, have come together to create a way to diagnose this severe problem that afflicts approximately 24 percent of men and 9 percent of women.
Diagnosing sleep apnea requires a significant investment in time from the patient. The procedure—called polysomnography, or better known as a “sleep study”—necessitates spending at least one night, and in some cases, several nights in a sleep lab. During that time, sensors are placed on the patient’s body, and this alone can lead to mood difficulties in patients as well as a change in their normal sleep patterns.
Findings reported in the journal Sleep indicate the new method is not only more reasonable for patients, but better for doctors as well. By employing an infrared camera to supervise both the airflow and the waveforms as a patient inhales and exhales, results can be fed into a computer programmed with specialized algorithms. The results offer the same level of accuracy as the previous testing methods, but they also help doctors see how the airflow is distributed, which could show them exactly what happens during the course of a patient’s breathing problems, leading to better diagnosis rates as well as better possible treatments. That could, of course, lead to new and better treatment methods for sleep apnea patients.
Clinically, an individual has to have a minimum of five episodes in any given hour of sleep to be diagnosed with sleep apnea. The three different forms of this condition are based around the blood oxygen desaturation rate in the individual. This is what the system of sensors detects, and while the cameras and algorithms can’t monitor everything the sensors can, they do provide a better point of origin for doctors. While it’s likely the new research will be used in conjunction with the methods of the past, the new methods could provide a first line of testing for many doctors around the world. As the research advances, it may be possible to develop additional technology to wholly eliminate the need for invasive sensors.
Caption: Traditional sleep studies use a variety of leads and probes on the patient's upper and lower face to gather data. In a new method, called thermal infrared imaging (TIRI), the two most obtrusive probes under the nose, the thermistor and nasal pressure probe, are no longer needed. Data is collected from a distance by a thermal camera. As the patient breathes in, cooler atmospheric air is brought into his or her nostrils, creating a unique thermal signature for inhale. On exhale, the air expelled from the lungs is warmer. TIRI not only makes it more comfortable for the patient to sleep during the study, but it gathers much more data from an array of points across the patient's lower face. The traditionally used thermistor only yields information about a specific point.
Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation; All images in blue band at the bottom (traditional output, Thermal Infrared Imaging output, and thermal camera and computer setup) courtesy of Computational Physiology Lab, University of Houston.
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