Sleep Apnea Syndrome Diagnosis based on Image Processing.
Yoshifumi Nishida, Taketoshi Mori, Hiroshi Mizoguchi, Tomomasa Sato · Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan · 1998
This paper proposes a new method of non-invasively and unrestrainedly diagnosis for the Sleep Apnea Syndrome (SAS) by TV image. The SAS is a disease that a patient stops breathing in sleep intermittently. A remarkable feature of the method is that the system is able to diagnose the SAS without directly attaching any sensors to the patient by utilizing image processing. This paper describes the method theoretically from the physiological point of view. The method consists of the following steps: 1) With an image processor, the system calculates optical flows from magnified images of the breast and the abdomen of the patient. 2) The system obtains medical parameters for the SAS diagnosis from the optical flows. The effectiveness of the proposed method is proved through applying an experimental system to some SAS patients with a help of doctors and nurses at a hospital.