A large collection of real-world pediatric sleep studies

Abstract

Despite being crucial to health and quality of life, sleep-especially pediatric sleep-is not yet well understood. This is exacerbated by lack of access to sufficient pediatric sleep data with clinical annotation. In order to accelerate research on pediatric sleep and its connection to health, we create the Nationwide Children's Hospital (NCH) Sleep DataBank and publish it at Physionet and the National Sleep Research Resource (NSRR), which is a large sleep data common with physiological data, clinical data, and tools for analyses. The NCH Sleep DataBank consists of 3,984 polysomnography studies and over 5.6 million clinical observations on 3,673 unique patients between 2017 and 2019 at NCH. The novelties of this dataset include: (1) large-scale sleep dataset suitable for discovering new insights via data mining, (2) explicit focus on pediatric patients, (3) gathered in a real-world clinical setting, and (4) the accompanying rich set of clinical data. The NCH Sleep DataBank is a valuable resource for advancing automatic sleep scoring and real-time sleep disorder prediction, among many other potential scientific discoveries.

Fig. 1

Age at the time of sleep study, where 20 patients that are more than 30 years old are not shown.

Fig. 2

Length of care at NCH before and after first sleep study, where each patient has two entries: one negative for length of care prior to first sleep study (in years), and one positive for follow up after first sleep study (in days). One entry above 1200 days and 5 entries below −25 years are not shown.

Fig. 3

Visual verification that a randomly chosen 30-second segment of sleep data on Natus Sleepworks (top) matches the sleep data in the corresponding EDF file (bottom), especially at the region of interest marked by red box. Natus Sleepworks may denoise or auto-scale some signals for the viewer.