Events Calendar

Upper Airway Dynamic Imaging During Awake and Asleep Tidal Breathing

Speaker: Chantal Darquenne, PhD, Professor, Dept. of Medicine University of California, San Diego

Talk Title: Upper Airway Dynamic Imaging During Awake and Asleep Tidal Breathing

Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series

Abstract: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is characterized by recurrent partial or complete airway closure during sleep, and has important clinical implications ranging from disruption of sleep with daytime sequelae of excessive sleepiness and poor quality of life to adverse cardiovascular or metabolic outcomes. While polysomnography and studies based on measurements of airway pressures and resistance have provided a wealth of information on upper airway physiology, they are unable to assess the three- dimensional anatomy of the upper airway and its conformational changes during breathing. Knowledge of the morphology and mechanical behavior of this structure is essential for a more complete understanding of the occurrence of upper airway obstruction. Such information can be obtained with imaging technology and will be the focus of this seminar.Data will be presented from a group of OSA subjects and a group of age- and BMI-matched healthy controls that underwent MR imaging to assess upper airway morphometry and changes in airway size during tidal breathing. Data were collected both during wakefulness and natural sleep with simultaneous measurement of nasal-oral flow partition and sleep state and stages. Results show significant differences in the magnitude of the changes in upper airway size over a tidal breath between OSA subjects and controls both during wakefulness and natural sleep suggesting that, for tidal breathing conditions, dynamic OSA imaging during wakefulness is representative of behavior during sleep.

Biography: Chantal Darquenne is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the President-elect of the International Society for Aerosols in Medicine. She earned her Ph.D. degree in Applied Sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in 1995. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Physiology at UCSD where she still holds her current position. Her laboratory uses an interdisciplinary approach combining engineering principles and lung physiology concepts to address her primary research interests that focus on aerosol transport and deposition in the lung, on lung ventilation inhomogeneities in health and disease, and more recently on upper airway dynamics in obstructive sleep apnea.

Host: Professor Krishna Nayak

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia White