Zahra Moussavi of University of Manitoba

Abstract

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is an underdiagnosed common disorder. Undiagnosed OSA, in particular, increases the perioperative morbidity and mortality risks for OSA patients undergoing surgery requiring full anesthesia. OSA screening using the gold standard, Polysomnography (PSG), is expensive, in need of expert skills and time-consuming.

In this talk, I will present the research on developing objective and accurate alternative tools for screening OSA during daytime (wakefulness) by a few minutes of breathing sounds analysis. In particular, I will explain our new algorithm, AWakeOSA, that extracts an optimized set (3-4) of breathing sound features specific to each anthropometric feature (i.e. age, sex, etc.), and uses a two-level diagnostic classification to determine OSA severity for each subject.

Biography:

Zahra Moussavi is a professor, a Canada Research Chair, and the founder and former director of Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program at University of Manitoba. Her current research focuses are on medical devices instrumentation and signal analysis for sleep apnea management and Alzheimer’s diagnosis and treatment using virtual reality, rTMS and EVestG technologies.  She is the recipient of several awards including the “2018 Technical Excellence Award,” Engineers Geoscientists Manitoba, Oct. 2018, “Canada’s Most Powerful Women (Top 100)”, “Manitoba Distinguished Women” in 2014 and IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer, 2014 and 2019. She has published more than 310 peer-reviewed papers in journals and conferences, and has given >117 invited talks/seminars including 2 Tedx Talks and 9 keynote speaker seminars at national and international conferences. Aside from academic work, on her spare time, she writes science articles for public; also, has developed and offered memory fitness programs for aging population.

Address:University of Manitoba,