Nocturnal Cardio-Respiratory Indices - A Novel Screening Tool for Pediatric Obstructive Sleep Disordered Breathing

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common breathing disorder among children with a prevalence estimated at 2-4%. Electrocardiography (ECG) based signal processing, especially heart rate analysis, demonstrated its promising future as both an alternative to other expensive portable sleep study methods and additional approach to sleep cardio-respiratory autonomic interactions which the current clinical standard polysomnography (PSG) lacks. A novel strategy was applied on pediatric OSA detection using RR intervals. A sensitivity of 89%, specificity of 96%, positive predictive value of 89%, and negative predictive value of 96% was achieved in case-to-case detection using 37 clinical pediatric full PSG data.