| |
This course is designed to provide an overall review in preparation for the national board exams in polysomnography.
This course covers:
- Exam preparation, testing strategies, and overview of the BRPT exam.
- The roles, responsibilities, and educational requirements of sleep technologists.
- Review of placement of EEG (using the International 10-20 System of electrode placement), non-EEG electrodes, and other ancillary equipment routinely used in sleep diagnostics.
- Reviewing 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.
- Summary 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.
- Review of basic cardiac electrophysiology, ECG electrode placement, basic measurements, and basic interpretation.
- Review of 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 as well as other ancillary equipment, and bio-calibration procedures.
- The micro-architecture of each of the sleep stages, placement of limb electrodes, amplifier settings and sensitivities, machine and patient calibration procedures, AASM recommended guidelines and scoring rules for staging sleep as well as arousals and limb movements.
- The indications for PAP therapy in polysomnography.
- Review of multiple sleep latency test (MSLT) and multiple wakefulness test (MWT) according to AASM guidelines.
- Summary of common artifacts and errors seen on a polysomnogram and techniques for troubleshooting as well as correcting errors and artifacts.
- AASM definitions 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).
- Review Cardiac-related events commonly seen on a polysomnogram, including example tracings of abnormal waveforms and waveform characteristics associated with each event.
- The criteria of sleep staging according to AASM standards for marking arousals and limb movements.
- Calculations commonly utilized in evaluating sleep/wake data for sleep studies as well as MSLTs.
|
|
