One Week Polysomnography Course

American Association for Respiratory Care (AARC)
Continuing Respiratory Care Education Credits (CRCE) available.

This course is designed to provide practical, hands-on training for entry-level personnel in polysomnography technology and covers the skills and knowledge needed to obtain high quality sleep recordings. Expanding upon the topics covered in Introductory to Polysomnography, this course is designed to provide a better understanding of sleep recording methodology, including all aspects of sleep staging, scoring, and event recognition using several types of sleep recording and scoring programs.

This course covers:

• The roles, responsibilities, and educational requirements of sleep technologists.
• Techniques for placement of EEG (using the International 10-20 System of electrode placement), non-EEG electrodes, and other ancillary equipment routinely used in sleep diagnostics.
• Procedures and methods for collecting, processing, and documenting information gathered from the sleep history, patient interview, and polysomnographic observations.
• Electrical theory, which includes discussions of signal derivations, voltage, sensitivity, deflection, signal polarity, transducer function, bio-electric potentials, ancillary equipment, AC/DC amplifiers, waveform terminology, filters, sensitivity controls, and time constants.
• Overview of data acquisition, data recording, and various monitoring equipment used in a sleep laboratory setting, including esophageal balloons, pressure transducers, respiratory effort belts, body position monitors, audiovisual equipment, thermistors, thermocouples, CO2 monitors, digital amplifiers, pulse oximeters, and snoring sensors.
• Basic cardiac electrophysiology, ECG electrode placement, basic measurements, and basic interpretation.
• Procedures for ensuring patient safety, including electrical safety, infection control, medication side-effects, fire safety, personal safety, basic and advanced resuscitation procedures, as well as sample emergency response protocols.
• Polysomnograph channel adjustments such as time axis alignment, electrical baselines, single channel calibration, preliminary all-channel calibration, final montage calibration, calibration of DC amplifiers and related equipment, and bio-calibration procedures.
• Under direct supervision of instructors, students will practice EEG and non-EEG electrode placement, and placement of ancillary monitoring equipment. This includes mock patient set-up, patient calibrations, and running a sleep study.
• The micro-architecture of each of the sleep stages, placement of limb electrodes, amplifier settings and sensitivities, machine and patient calibration procedures, American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) recommended guidelines for scoring rules for staging sleep as well as arousals and limb movements.
• The indications, advantages, disadvantages, and limitations of Positive Airway Pressure (PAP) therapy in polysomnography, including instrumentation, methodology, and sample protocols/guidelines.
• The classifications, mechanisms of actions, indications, contraindications, and side effects of medications commonly used to treat sleep disorders.
• The indications for conducting a Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT) and Multiple Wakefulness Test (MWT) according to AASM guidelines, including set-up, preparation, montage selection, specific procedures, scoring criteria, and documentation.
• The common artifacts and errors seen on a polysomnogram, including techniques for troubleshooting and correcting errors and artifacts commonly seen during acquisition of a polysomnogram.
• Definitions and example tracings of respiratory-related events commonly seen on a polysomnogram, including of apneas, hypopneas, Respiratory Event Related Arousals (RERA’s), primary snoring, and Upper Airway Resistance Syndrome (UARS).
• Cardiac-related events commonly seen on a polysomnogram, including example tracings of abnormal waveforms and waveform characteristics associated with each event.
• Hands on practice fitting/applying masks and set-up/operation of PAP equipment.
• Sleep/wake analysis results of respiratory, limb movements, and cardiac events.
• Sleep/wake analysis results of a Positive Airway Pressure (PAP) titration study.
• Protocols and techniques for evaluating optimal and therapeutic PAP levels on sample sleep studies.
• The criteria used for scoring Multiple Sleep Latency Tests (MSLT) and Mean Wakefulness Tests (MWT) as per AASM guidelines.
• Calculations commonly utilized to evaluate sleep/wake data for sleep studies, MSLTs and MWTs.
• Explanations of the equations and abbreviations used, including examples in the format required to study for the Board of Registered Polysomnographic Technologists (BRPT) exam.
• The procedures for generating a sleep report using information gathered during the data acquisition phase of the sleep study.
• The components of the sleep report and the different types of sleep reports that can be generated, such as diagnostic, therapeutic, split night studies, and MSLTs.
• Supervised practice of sleep staging and calculations utilizing sample studies.
• Evaluating MSLT/MWT studies and performing calculations using clinical examples provided.