Chest area segmentation in 3D images of sleeping patients

Although the field of sleep study has greatly developed over recent years, the most common and efficient way to detect sleep issues remains a sleep examination performed in a sleep laboratory. This examination measures several vital signals by polysomnograph during a full night's sleep using multiple sensors connected to the patient's body. Nevertheless, despite being the gold standard, the sensors and the unfamiliar environment's connection inevitably impact the quality of the patient's sleep and the examination itself. Therefore, with the novel development of accurate and affordable 3D sensing devices, new approaches for non-contact sleep study have emerged. These methods utilize different techniques to extract the same breathing parameters but with contactless methods. However, to enable reliable remote extraction, these methods require accurate identification of the basic region of interest (ROI), i.e., the patient's chest area. The lack of automated ROI segmenting of 3D time series is currently holding back the development process. We propose an automatic chest area segmentation algorithm that given a time series of 3D frames containing a sleeping patient as input outputs a segmentation image with the pixels that correspond to the chest area. Beyond significantly speeding up the development process of the non-contact methods, accurate automatic segmentation can enable a more precise feature extraction. In addition, further tests of the algorithm on existing data demonstrate its ability to improve the sensitivity of a prior solution that uses manual ROI selection. The approach is on average 46.9% more sensitive with a maximal improvement of 220% when compared to manual ROI. All mentioned can pave the way for placing non-contact algorithms as leading candidates to replace existing traditional methods used today.