Hi, I have noticed that the tsv files in the NCH database include respiratory events and sleep stages. I was wondering if there is any plan to add AHI values for every PSG study. If no, according to which guidelines the respiratory events were annotated (in order to calculate the AHI myself)?
thanks, Sharon
Thanks Sharon - it's a good question and has come up for discussion in the NSRR team before. At present we don't have any plans to extract PSG metrics from the TSV annotations.
The NCH publication (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9296671/pdf/41597_2022_Article_1545.pdf) has this to say:
Sleep studies were annotated in real time by technicians at the time of the study, and then were staged and scored by a second technician afer the study was completed. Technicians annotated studies using a combination of free-form text entries and selections within Natus Sleepworks. Technicians tried to identify all events of interest, however each technician may have their own style of text annotation. Due to the variability in sleep stages in children, NCH does not use automatic scoring of sleep stages. All sleep stages were manually scored by a technician and then verifed or changed by a physician board certifed in sleep medicine.
Sleep studies were manually downloaded and converted to EDF+format between May 2019 and Feb. 2020 using Natus Sleepworks version 9. Any gaps in the time-series data were padded with zeros as part of the conversion. Te specifc acquisition equipment, setup, and montage all followed standard care protocol at NCH. While changes may have been made to some studies, the NCH protocol for PSG is in accordance with the rules and technical specifcations recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine10,11. Standard channel names are used and documented in the header of the EDF fles, allowing inference of the montage.
I don't see any other notes/documentation on this end about the scoring rules/guidelines.