Elwali Ahmed
Marian University, IN·Biomedical Engineering
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a disorder in which the airway repeatedly closes during sleep, affects a large share of the more than one billion people with sleep apnea worldwide. It fragments sleep, lowers blood oxygen, and is linked to heart disease, diabetes and cognitive decline.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Engineering
- Topics
obstructive sleep apnea
sleep apnea screening
breathing sounds
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Refine the wakefulness breathing-sound screening algorithm by reducing the influence of body measurements on classification and adding within-person variability, combining deterministic and non-deterministic machine learning models.
- Identify breathing-sound features that correlate with and predict the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI, breathing pauses per hour), oxygen desaturation index and apnea index, using machine learning, signal processing and statistical analysis.
- Develop custom recording hardware and a microphone chamber that capture breathing sounds more reliably, making the screening device portable, low-cost and user-friendly.
More about the research
Yet most cases go undiagnosed. The standard test is an overnight sleep study called polysomnography, which many people cannot easily access. The common screening questionnaires, such as STOP-BANG, flag many people who do not actually have OSA.
Why it matters
A quick, objective test that works while the patient is awake could help detect sleep apnea earlier, especially in rural, underserved and low-resource settings that lack sleep labs. It could also help screen patients before surgery under full anesthesia, where untreated apnea adds risk. Earlier detection may lower diagnostic costs and reduce the complications of untreated disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Eric Kezirian
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether tissue-repositioning soft palate surgery reduces upper airway collapsibility in people with obstructive sleep apnea, and whether the drop is larger when blockage is limited to the palate on drug-induced sleep endoscopy and airflow-shape analysis.
Devin L Brown
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine which obstructive sleep apnea endotypes, such as airway collapsibility, loop gain and arousal threshold, drive sleep apnea after stroke, and how they differ by ethnicity and from stroke-free participants, using polysomnography in the BASIC study.
Louise O'Brien
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether an enhanced self-supported nasopharyngeal airway (ssNPA), a nasal stent that keeps the throat open, is acceptable to and tolerated by children with hypotonic upper airway obstruction and sleep apnea.
The school
Marian University: 1 labs on PI Pages, $8M a year on research, 37 research doctorates a year.
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