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New method to treating sleep apnea

Written by: David Castillo on November 6th, 2009

New method to treating sleep apnea | read this item

Sleep apnea is one of the most common sleep disorders in the world today, especially among populations in highly-urbanized areas—where there are tremendous amounts of pollution.

This condition is characterized by breathing problems during sleep due to blockages in the respiratory pathways. Sleep apnea is dangerous because it cuts the oxygen supply from the brain to the other organs. The people, who have this condition, do not know that they are actually suffocating while they are sleeping. That’s why some researchers are now devising a new method to detect the dangerous condition.

In a recent paper published by the Eckhard-Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Houston, Ioannis Pavlidis, and University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSC) Division of Pulmonary Critical Care Sleep Medicine Assistant Professor of Medicine Jayasimha N. Murthy, there was a new less-invasive diagnosis method that was introduced.

“It’s not as simple as paying a visit to the doctor in the morning for an hour and walking away with a prescription,” said Pavlidis. “You have to undergo overnight monitoring in a sleep lab. The subject is wired and sleeps there. Sometimes, the subject has to spend more than one night.”

Murthy adds, “During a sleep study a subject has an average of more than 20 sensors attached to the head and body. It’s a very complex procedure where many physiological parameters are simultaneously monitored to help in the diagnosis of sleep disorders. However, these sensors can disturb sleep and contribute to the patient’s anxiety.”

The new method uses a thermal infrared camera to detect breathing waveforms that patient produces as he/she sleeps. The airflow is analyzed in a less-intrusive manner. It then uses computational algorithms to process the readings. The initial results indicate that diagnostics are as accurate as other renowned sleep studies.

“In contrast to the traditional one-dimensional methods, this new method is an imaging one and thus, multi-dimensional,” said Pavlidis. “We now can see how airflow is distributed locally throughout the extent of the nostril. We get not a single, but multiple values for each nostril at every point in time and this makes a lot of difference when it comes to appreciating subtle pathology.”

Source: SoftPedia

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