Signal Solutions has developed a novel, noninvasive and automated piezoelectric-based sleep detection system for high-throughput studies of sleep in mice, and has recently expanded to rat studies as well. The respiratory signal detected by the piezo sensor during sleep can be applied to investigate important health conditions including respiratory depression due to disease or drug use, and other sleep disordered breathing conditions such as Central Sleep Apnea (CSA), which contributes to approximately 20% of all sleep apnea in humans. Rodent models are essential to better understand respiratory control of breathing and to investigate respiratory abnormalities that present with disease. CSA is increasingly recognized as an important contributing factor to the morbidity and mortality in a number of cardiovascular diseases. Respiratory depression can cause immediate death in diseases such as epilepsy, and cases such as opiate overdose, or many other drugs. Preclinical studies of such drugs in rodents would be greatly improved if there was an easier way to monitor breathing. The current methods used to monitor breathing in rodents are laborious, expensive, and technically challenging. Plethysmography is used to study breathing in rodents, and measures small breath volumes while the animal is confined to a small chamber This technology is expensive and stressful to the animal, and can only be used over short periods. Sleep disordered breathing is difficult to examine due to time required for the animal to adapt to the chamber, and the limited time for keeping the animal confined. Signal Solutions? sleep system is ideally suited to improve methods for assessing a variety of breathing variables. During sleep or quiet wake, breathing is the primary movement, and our technology thus provides accurate respiratory traces. In addition to breath rates, apneas are easily detected, and should be amenable to automatic scoring. The advantages over current technology for detection of altered breathing includes cost- effective, noninvasive, stress-free, continuous monitoring that is high-throughput, and requires no surgery to monitor sleep. Adapting our system for breathing applications will be made by meeting the following objectives: 1) Optimize compatibility of our piezo sensor system with standard plethysmography; 2) Collect simultaneous piezo and plethysmography data in both rats and mice under multiple conditions. 3) Score, assess and quantify signals from the piezo system vs. plethysmography for several respiratory variables. 4) Develop and optimize algorithms for automatic scoring, and optimize performance. The outcome of this project will be to provide researchers with a simple to use, cost effective technology for basic and pre-clinical studies in rodents investigating respiratory depression, sleep apnea, and other disordered breathing during sleep that contribute to extensive morbidity and mortality in people.
Our goal is to develop simpler, less expensive and less stressful noninvasive technology to monitor breathing parameters in rodents. This tool will provide wider access to monitor respiratory output in rodents to study breathing disorders associated with neurodegenerative diseases, central sleep apnea, heart failure, spinal cord injury and drugs with dangerous respiratory related side effects.
