TITLE:
Software Tool Development and Application Focusing in EDF Signal Readings and Polysomnography
AUTHORS:
Iúri Barros Werneck Dotta, Santiago Santos Manganoti, Andreas Nascimento
KEYWORDS:
Polysomnography, EDF Signal Analysis, Medicine Automation, Sleep Disorders, C++
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.8 No.9,
September
11,
2015
ABSTRACT: The EDF+ (European Data Format Plus) is a
flexible and open source data format created in order to store and exchange
biomedical signals. It is known worldwide and used by a large variety of
specialists in the area. EDF+ signals have been subjected to many researches
of clinical interest amongst diagnosing and for treatment of diseases related
to sleeping disorders. Nevertheless, more complete and user-friendly tools,
which use these signals, are yet too few in the market. This paper presents a
new tool developed in order to read and analyze EDF+ signals, focusing in the
area of sleep disorders. It includes several features, such as organizing
signal channels through previous montage customizations, sleep stage bars and
graphics for analyzing the quality of sleep (hypnograms). It provides easiness
in the whole process of interpretation and scoring of sleep events in
polysomnography exams. The software development used the C++ language, due to
its great versatility and efficiency, using Visual Studio Community 2013? as
the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Moreover, it implements many
Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques, for instance, its own set of
digital filters. This paper presents an application of Polysomnography analysis
software and suggests a modification on the way to interpret the EDF+ standard
and its usage.