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Published on: October 2, 2019
Detection of juvenile sleep deprivation by stochastic optimization of pupillographic records
W O'Neill1, P Mercer, S Sheldon
1Bioengineering Department, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA. woneill@usc.edu
Insights
Measuring juvenile sleep deprivation is challenging. A pupillographic method shows sleep deprivation decreases pupillary noise variance in children, similar to adults.
Area of Science:
- Ophthalmology
- Sleep Medicine
- Pediatrics
Background:
- Assessing sleep deprivation in children presents unique challenges.
- Previous research successfully used pupillography in adults with narcolepsy.
Purpose of the Study:
- To test if pupillography can differentiate sleep-deprived from rested children.
- To adapt an adult pupillographic method for pediatric sleep assessment.
Main Methods:
- Pupillographic recordings were taken from 8 children (median age 7) serving as their own controls.
- A nonstationary model estimated pupillary diameter responses to photic stimuli.
- Kullback divergence optimized stochastic parameters to separate sleep-deprived from control data.
Main Results:
- Statistically significant differences in pupillary noise function statistics were observed between sleep-deprived and rested states.
- Sleep deprivation was found to decrease pupillary noise variance in children.
- Optimal stochastic parameters for juveniles were similar to those found in adult narcolepsy studies.
Conclusions:
- Preliminary findings suggest pupillography is a promising method for measuring juvenile sleep deprivation.
- The consistency across age groups supports potential for a broad clinical trial.
- This method may allow for simultaneous data collection and sleep deprivation measurement.
Objective:
To address the challenging problem of measuring juvenile sleep deprivation, we test the hypothesis that a pupillographic method found successful for adult narcoleptics might also discriminate between sleep deprived juveniles acting as their own controls.
Methods:
A linear, nonstationary model relating pupillary diameter and a random photic stimulus are estimated by recursive regressions from pupillographic records of 8 juveniles of median age 7 years acting as their own rested controls. The estimated pupillary impulse response noise functions are stochastically optimized using the Kullback divergence measure to maximally separate the sleep deprived records from the control records.
Results:
Both the average and covariance statistics of the estimated pupillary noise functions exhibit statistically significant differences between sleep deprived and rested subjects. The main result is that sleep deprivation decreases pupillary noise variance; a finding consistent with a previous study of adult narcoleptics. Further, it was found that virtually the same stochastic parameters were optimal for the juvenile sleep deprived data and for the previous adult narcoleptic study.
Conclusions:
Although our results are preliminary, the consistent reduction of pupillary noise appears to justify a comprehensive clinical trial across a broad range of age classes. In addition, the finding that the same parameters stochastically optimize both juvenile and adult recordings suggests the procedure holds promise as a clinical test which could produce sleep deprivation measures simultaneous with data collection.
