Researchers Harness AI and Other Innovations to Detect Sleep Apnea

Finding new and better ways to identify and diagnose people with sleep apnea is significant because over 80% of those with moderate to severe sleep apnea are undiagnosed. Without treatment, these people face a greater risk of anxiety, depression, heart attack, stroke, car crashes, and other problems. 

Many people with sleep apnea go undiagnosed because of a lack of adequate screening tools. The existing tools are unreliable, and many doctors don’t use them. Trusted Source UpToDate More than 2 million healthcare providers around the world choose UpToDate to help make appropriate care decisions and drive better health outcomes. UpToDate delivers evidence-based clinical decision support that is clear, actionable, and rich with real-world insights. View Source

Dr. Han-Gil Jeong led a team of researchers from Seoul National University in testing out a potential new sleep apnea screening tool earlier this year. After using AI technology to analyze X-rays of people’s heads and necks, this tool could predict whether or not a person had sleep apnea with a high level of accuracy.

Obstructive sleep apnea occurs because the upper airways become narrowed or blocked while a person sleeps. By learning from past X-rays of people with obstructive sleep apnea, the team’s AI model could find slight tongue, mouth, or throat variations that might lead to a blocked airway. These features are so small that experts can’t identify them by simply looking at the X-rays with the human eye. 

A lack of adequate screening tools isn’t the only reason people with sleep apnea go undiagnosed. Even people identified as likely having sleep apnea may not be screened because testing can be complex and inconvenient. 

Sleep apnea is currently diagnosed with an overnight sleep study in a lab or at home. Both require a person to stay hooked up to various monitoring devices while they sleep, Trusted Source UpToDate More than 2 million healthcare providers around the world choose UpToDate to help make appropriate care decisions and drive better health outcomes. UpToDate delivers evidence-based clinical decision support that is clear, actionable, and rich with real-world insights. View Source which may make testing difficult, especially for people with certain heart or lung conditions.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and West Virginia University recently tried an ingestible capsule that collects heart and breathing data in humans for the first time. 

Participants in the research study swallowed the capsules and then spent the night undergoing traditional sleep studies. This approach allowed researchers to compare the capsules’ data to those from the usual monitoring devices. The capsules accurately collected breathing and heart rate data that closely mirrored that collected by the sleep study devices. This demonstrates the capsule’s potential for eventually replacing some monitoring devices now used in sleep apnea testing.