Development and application of a physiological ventilation device test bench, capable of reproducing automatically respiratory profiles registered with ventilation polygraph

Overview & Synopsis

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome affects 6% to 17% of adult population. The reference treatment is nocturnal ventilation via an either fixed or auto-titrating positive airway pressure (APAP) to maintain upper airway (UA) open. Treatment efficiency of APAP depends greatly on algorithms and technologies used for detecting and characterizing disordered breathing events (linked to UA obstruction or central command).Bench tests have been developed to evaluate APAP devices under the same conditions, by simulating respiratory scenarios composed of a repetitive string of several disordered breathing events registered from apneic patients or artificially designed.Therefore, breathing profiles simulated on benches are standardized and simplified, in comparison with patients’. To improve this disadvantage, a new physiological bench, which enables reproducing automatically a specific patient breathing profile from its polygraph recordings, has been created. It has been validated by simulating various breathing profiles issuing from 12 patients of different pathological phenotypes.Through this new bench, the accuracy of residual apnea hypopnea indices (AHI) determined by 4 APAP devices (AirSense 10, DreamStation Auto, S.Box and Prisma 20A) has also been investigated in comparison with polygraph scorings. The results would help physicians in clinical practice thanks to the quantification of AHI discrepancies between manufacturers.