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The Case Sleep and Epidemiology
Research Center serves as the Polysomnography (PSG) Reading Center for some of
the largest National Institutes of Health initiated multi-center studies of
sleep disorders. Established in 1994 with the initiation of the Sleep Heart
Health Study (SHHS), the SERC has since served as the Reading Center for:
the Study of Osteoporetic Fractures in
Women Sleep Study; MrOS Sleep Study; Honolulu Asian American Aging Sleep Study,
Pickering-NYU Sleep study, and numerous Cleveland-based sleep epidemiological
studies. In toto, over the past 10 years, these studies have produced an enormous,
unique database of > 14,000 sleep studies, contributing to a database that
includes standardized and rigorously collected physiological signals, sleep
scoring, and comprehensive clinical and epidemiological information on risk
factors, outcomes and co-morbidities. The SERC has developed rigorous methods
for training and monitoring technicians and scorers, for conduct of sleep
research studies in unattended, community-based settings, and for processing,
scoring, analyzing, and archiving thousands of records obtained in diverse
settings. (Redline S, Sanders M, Lind B,
Quan S, Iber C, Gottlieb D, Bonekat W, Rapoport DW, Smith PL, Kiley J. Methods
for obtaining and analyzing unattended polysomnography data for a multicenter
study. Sleep NIH 50th Year Commemorative Issue. 1998; 21:759-768.)
Scoring Sleep Studies
We have developed detailed methods for scoring
large numbers of PSGs, which include detailed
criteria for marking events and dealing with
ambiguous tracings. These approaches have been documented to achieve standardization in scoring
PSGs. Research polysomnologists have undergone
rigorous training (with regular ongoing
re-training), participate in weekly quality
improvement exercises, and are periodically
re-evaluated. Scorer reliability is monitored
and tracked. More...
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