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Publications

Publications by CTM

2025

Enhancing Obstructive Sleep Apnea Diagnosis: Integrating Automated Detection and Event Duration Analysis

Authors
Almeida, E; Pereira Rodrigues, P; Ferreira Santos, D;

Publication
Studies in health technology and informatics

Abstract
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder marked by repeated episodes of airway obstruction, leading to apneas (complete blockage) or hypopneas (partial blockage) during sleep. The standard diagnostic metric, the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), quantifies the number of these events per hour of sleep but has limitations, such as its dependence on manual interpretation and lack of attention to event duration, which can be clinically significant. To address these issues, this study developed an algorithm to detect respiratory events from nasal airflow signals and measure their duration, using data from 22 patients at St. Vincent's University Hospital, sourced from the PhysioNet dataset. Signal processing techniques, including filtering and envelope analysis, were applied to extract features, and apnea/hypopnea events were identified based on American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) guidelines. Events were classified by duration into three groups: 10-20 seconds, 20-40 seconds, and over 40 seconds. Preliminary results showed detection accuracy of 60% for apnea and 93% for hypopnea events. The study also explored relations between event duration and demographic factors, such as age, gender, body mass index (BMI), and Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) scores, to assess whether longer events were linked to greater severity. These findings suggest that incorporating event duration and automated detection into OSA diagnosis could improve accuracy and provide better insight into the condition, potentially leading to more personalized treatments.

2025

Automating Data Extraction from PDF Sleep Reports Using Data Mining Techniques

Authors
Teixeira, F; Costa, J; Amorim, P; Guimarães, N; Ferreira Santos, D;

Publication
Studies in health technology and informatics

Abstract
This work introduces a web application for extracting, processing, and visualizing data from sleep studies reports. Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the pipeline extracts over 75 key data points from four types of sleep reports. The web application offers an intuitive interface to view individual reports' details and aggregate data from multiple reports. The pipeline demonstrated 100% accuracy in extracting targeted information from a test set of 40 reports, even in cases with missing data or formatting inconsistencies. The developed tool streamlines the analysis of OSA reports, reducing the need for technical expertise and enabling healthcare providers and researchers to utilize sleep study data efficiently. Future work aims to expand the dataset for more complex analyses and imputation techniques.

2025

A comparative analysis of unsupervised machine-learning methods in PSG-related phenotyping

Authors
Ghorvei, M; Karhu, T; Hietakoste, S; Ferreira Santos, D; Hrubos Strom, H; Islind, AS; Biedebach, L; Nikkonen, S; Leppaenen, T; Rusanen, M;

Publication
JOURNAL OF SLEEP RESEARCH

Abstract
Obstructive sleep apnea is a heterogeneous sleep disorder with varying phenotypes. Several studies have already performed cluster analyses to discover various obstructive sleep apnea phenotypic clusters. However, the selection of the clustering method might affect the outputs. Consequently, it is unclear whether similar obstructive sleep apnea clusters can be reproduced using different clustering methods. In this study, we applied four well-known clustering methods: Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering; K-means; Fuzzy C-means; and Gaussian Mixture Model to a population of 865 suspected obstructive sleep apnea patients. By creating five clusters with each method, we examined the effect of clustering methods on forming obstructive sleep apnea clusters and the differences in their physiological characteristics. We utilized a visualization technique to indicate the cluster formations, Cohen's kappa statistics to find the similarity and agreement between clustering methods, and performance evaluation to compare the clustering performance. As a result, two out of five clusters were distinctly different with all four methods, while three other clusters exhibited overlapping features across all methods. In terms of agreement, Fuzzy C-means and K-means had the strongest (kappa = 0.87), and Agglomerative hierarchical clustering and Gaussian Mixture Model had the weakest agreement (kappa = 0.51) between each other. The K-means showed the best clustering performance, followed by the Fuzzy C-means in most evaluation criteria. Moreover, Fuzzy C-means showed the greatest potential in handling overlapping clusters compared with other methods. In conclusion, we revealed a direct impact of clustering method selection on the formation and physiological characteristics of obstructive sleep apnea clusters. In addition, we highlighted the capability of soft clustering methods, particularly Fuzzy C-means, in the application of obstructive sleep apnea phenotyping.

2025

Observations of Microlensed Images with Dual-field Interferometry: On-sky Demonstration and Prospects

Authors
Mróz, P; Dong, SB; Mérand, A; Shangguan, JY; Woillez, J; Gould, A; Udalski, A; Eisenhauer, F; Ryu, YH; Wu, ZX; Liu, ZK; Yang, HJ; Bourdarot, G; Defrère, D; Drescher, A; Fabricius, M; Garcia, P; Genzel, R; Gillessen, S; Hönig, SF; Kreidberg, L; Le Bouquin, JB; Lutz, D; Millour, F; Ott, T; Paumard, T; Sauter, J; Shimizu, TT; Straubmeier, C; Subroweit, M; Widmann, F; GRAVITY Collaboration; Szymanski, MK; Soszynski, I; Pietrukowicz, P; Kozlowski, S; Poleski, R; Skowron, J; Ulaczyk, K; Gromadzki, M; Rybicki, K; Iwanek, P; Wrona, M; Mróz, MJ; OGLE Collaboration; Albrow, MD; Chung, SJ; Han, C; Hwang, KH; Jung, YK; Shin, IG; Shvartzvald, Y; Yee, JC; Zang, W; Cha, SM; Kim, DJ; Kim, SL; Lee, CU; Lee, DJ; Lee, Y; Park, BG; Pogge, RW; KMTNet Collaboration;

Publication
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL

Abstract
Interferometric observations of gravitational microlensing events offer an opportunity for precise, efficient, and direct mass and distance measurements of lensing objects, especially those of isolated neutron stars and black holes. However, such observations have previously been possible for only a handful of extremely bright events. The recent development of a dual-field interferometer, GRAVITY Wide, has made it possible to reach out to significantly fainter objects and increase the pool of microlensing events amenable to interferometric observations by 2 orders of magnitude. Here, we present the first successful observation of a microlensing event with GRAVITY Wide and the resolution of microlensed images in the event OGLE-2023-BLG-0061/KMT-2023-BLG-0496. We measure the angular Einstein radius of the lens with subpercent precision, theta E = 1.280 +/- 0.009 mas. Combined with the microlensing parallax detected from the event light curve, the mass and distance to the lens are found to be 0.472 +/- 0.012 M circle dot and 1.81 +/- 0.05 kpc, respectively. We present the procedure for the selection of targets for interferometric observations and discuss possible systematic effects affecting GRAVITY Wide data. This detection demonstrates the capabilities of the new instrument, and it opens up completely new possibilities for the follow-up of microlensing events and future routine discoveries of isolated neutron stars and black holes.

2025

Exploring the presence of a fifth force at the Galactic Center

Authors
Abd El Dayem, K; Abuter, R; Aimar, N; Seoane, PA; Amorim, A; Berger, JP; Bonnet, H; Bourdarot, G; Brandner, W; Cardoso, V; Clénet, Y; Davies, R; de Zeeuw, PT; Drescher, A; Eckart, A; Eisenhauer, F; Feuchtgruber, H; Finger, G; Schreiber, NMF; Foschi, A; Garcia, P; Gendron, E; Genzel, R; Gillessen, S; Hartl, M; Haubois, X; Haussmann, F; Henning, T; Hippler, S; Horrobin, M; Jochum, L; Jocou, L; Kaufer, A; Kervella, P; Lacour, S; Lapeyrère, V; Le Bouquin, JB; Léna, P; Lutz, D; Mang, F; More, N; Osorno, J; Ott, T; Paumard, T; Perraut, K; Perrin, G; Rabien, S; Ribeiro, DC; Bordoni, MS; Scheithauer, S; Shangguan, J; Shimizu, T; Stadler, J; Straub, O; Straubmeier, C; Sturm, E; Tacconi, LJ; Urso, I; Vincent, F; von Fellenberg, SD; Wieprecht, E; Woillez, J;

Publication
ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS

Abstract
Aims. We investigate the presence of a Yukawa-like correction to Newtonian gravity at the Galactic Center, leading to a new upper limit on the intensity of such a correction. Methods. We performed a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis using the astrometric and spectroscopic data of star S2 collected at the Very Large Telescope by GRAVITY, NACO, and SINFONI instruments, covering the period from 1992 to 2022. Results. The precision of the GRAVITY instrument allows us to derive the most stringent upper limit at the Galactic Center for the intensity of the Yukawa contribution (proportional to alpha e(-lambda r)) of |alpha|< 0.003 for a scale length of lambda = 3 & sdot; 10(13) m (similar to 200 AU). This is an improvement on all estimates obtained in previous works by roughly one order of magnitude.

2025

Orbit and atmosphere of HIP 99770 b through the eyes of VLTI/GRAVITY

Authors
Winterhalder, TO; Kammerer, J; Lacour, S; Mérand, A; Nowak, M; Stolker, T; Balmer, WO; Marleau, GD; Abuter, R; Amorim, A; Asensio-Torres, R; Berger, JP; Beust, H; Blunt, S; Bonnefoy, M; Bonnet, H; Bordoni, MS; Bourdarot, G; Brandner, W; Cantalloube, F; Caselli, P; Charnay, B; Chauvin, G; Chavez, A; Choquet, E; Christiaens, V; Clénet, Y; du Foresto, VC; Cridland, A; Davies, R; Dembet, R; Dexter, J; Drescher, A; Duvert, G; Eckart, A; Eisenhauer, F; Schreiber, NMF; Garcia, P; Lopez, RG; Gardner, T; Gendron, E; Genzel, R; Gillessen, S; Girard, JH; Grant, S; Haubois, X; el, GH; Henning, T; Hinkley, S; Hippler, S; Houlle, M; Hubert, Z; Jocou, L; Keppler, M; Kervella, P; Kreidberg, L; Kurtovic, NT; Lagrange, AM; Lapeyrere, V; Le Bouquin, JB; Lutz, D; Maire, AL; Mang, F; Molliere, P; Mordasi, C; Mouillet, D; Nasedkin, E; Ott, T; Otten, GPPL; Paladini, C; Paumard, T; Perraut, K; Perrin, G; Pourre, N; Pueyo, L; Ribeiro, D; Rickman, E; Rustamkulov, Z; Shangguan, J; Shimizu, T; Sing, D; Stadler, J; Straub, O; Straubmeier, C; Sturm, E; Tacconi, LJ; van Dishoeck, EF; Vigan, A; Vincent, F; von Fellenberg, SD; Wang, JJ; Widmann, F; Woillez, J; Yazici, S; GRAVITY Collaboration;

Publication
ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS

Abstract
Context. Inferring the likely formation channel of giant exoplanets and brown dwarf companions from orbital and atmospheric observables remains a formidable challenge. Further and more precise directly measured dynamical masses of these companions are required to inform and gauge formation, evolutionary, and atmospheric models. We present an updated study of the recently discovered companion to HIP 99770 based on observations conducted with the near-infrared interferometer VLTI/GRAVITY.Aims. Through renewed orbital and spectral analyses based on the GRAVITY data, we characterise HIP 99770 b to better constrain its orbit, dynamical mass, and atmospheric properties, as well as to shed light on its likely formation channel.Methods. Upon inclusion of the new high-precision astrometry epoch, we ran an orbit fit to further constrain the dynamical mass of the companion and the orbit solution. We also analysed the GRAVITY K-band spectrum, placing it into context with literature data, and extracting magnitude, age, spectral type, bulk properties and atmospheric characteristics of HIP 99770 b.Results. We detected the companion at a radial separation of 417 mas from its host. The new orbit fit yields a dynamical mass of 17-5+6 MJup and an eccentricity of 0.31-0.12+0.06. We also find that additional relative astrometry epochs in the future will not enable further constraints on the dynamical mass due to the dominating relative uncertainty on the Hipparcos-Gaia proper motion anomaly that is used in the orbit-fitting routine. The publication of Gaia DR4 will likely ease this predicament. Based on the spectral analysis, we find that the companion is consistent with spectral type L8 and exhibits a potential metal enrichment in its atmosphere. Adopting the AMES-DUSTY model to infer its age, within its dynamical mass constraint the companion conceivably corresponds to either a younger (28-14+15 Myr) object with a mass just below the deuterium-burning limit or an older (119-10+37 Myr) body with a mass just above the deuterium-burning limit.Conclusions. These results do not yet allow for a definite inference of the companion's formation channel. Nevertheless, the new constraints on its bulk properties and the additional GRAVITY spectrum presented here will aid future efforts to determine the formation history of HIP 99770 b.

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