Pediatric Polysomnography

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Polysomnography, the advent in the 1950s of an objective means of recording and analyzing sleep, greatly accelerated progress in the scientific description of sleep, including the establishment of age-sex norms. In the 1980s, polysomnography enabled the discovery and description of obstructive sleep apnea, a relatively common condition having co-morbidities such as hypertension, stroke, diabetes, epilepsy, and possibly some variants of Alzheimer's disease, as well as detrimental effects on waking cognitive function and mood. During the past two decades, the marriage of relatively inexpensive desktop computers to polysomnography has spawned the field of digital/computerized polysomnography (cPSG). While cPSG has offered indubitable advantages over its analog predecessor in terms of the flexibility and ease of data display and editing, as well as in space requirements and cost of data archival, cPSG provides a decreased accuracy of its data representation/analysis and display on the 30 second computer monitor screen. The proposed work offers the possibility of a third paradigmatic advance in polysomnography-an originally conceived software system that builds upon technological advances of the past decade in computer hardware and software, enabling accurate representation, display, analysis, report generation, and archival of the core dynamic sleep waves and waveforms of children's (and adults') sleep, while maintaining capability of providing traditionally computed "sleep architecture" macroparameters for pediatric and adult sleep. Our completed Phase I work successfully performed bench work development and validation of the system's foundational waveform detection and analysis tools for the accurate representation, display, and analysis of the delta waves of pediatric sleep. The Phase II work will extend this development to all of the primary waves and waveforms of pediatric sleep, additionally scaffolding the development to a tool permitting accessing of PSG data from multiple hardware platforms and in multiple data formats, and to a powerful but relatively inexpensive database management module offering customized data archival. The innovative system development will be validated by bench testing and by a sleep lab validation study of its automated analysis capability. The system's capabilities far exceed the capabilities offered by commercially available systems, auguring an enormous commercial potential.