3D facial photography offers quick way to predict sleep apnoea

Three-dimensional facial photography can provide a simple and highly accurate method of predicting the presence of obstructive sleep apnoea.

The research, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, builds on previous work identifying that the structure of the face, head and neck played a key role in diagnosing sleep apnoea.

Professor Peter Eastwood, director of the Centre for Sleep Science (and Director of the Raine Study), and his research team ran overnight sleep studies while Dr Syed Zulqarnain Gilani, from UWA’s School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, analysed the 3D faces.

“What we found was that we could predict the presence of obstructive sleep apnoea with 91 per cent accuracy when craniofacial measurements from 3D photography were combined into a single predictive algorithm,” Dr Gilani said.

Sleep disorders are estimated to cost the Australian health system more than $5 billion annually. More than half the cost is associated with sleep apnoea which is associated with snoring and repeated periods of ‘choking’ during sleep.

Sleep apnoea causes daytime sleepiness and is strongly linked to sleepiness related accidents, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and depression. Despite sleep apnoea being treatable, the vast majority – up to 75 per cent – of individuals remain undiagnosed.

This is largely because current methods of assessing sleep apnoea are expensive and access to them is limited.

The study recruited 400 middle-aged men and women who took part in sleep studies at UWA’s Centre for Sleep Science (as part of our Gen1 Sleep Study) and Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital while their faces were analysed from 3D photographs.

The study suggested that it might also be possible to predict the severity of a person’s sleep apnoea from these photographs.

“This breakthrough has the potential to reduce the burden on hospitals and sleep clinics that currently run sleep studies for everyone,” Dr Gilani said. “It can flag people at risk of sleep apnoea who can then be referred for diagnosis and treatment.”

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