How to accurately determine the site of obstruction in snoring patients?

  Sleep monitoring and upper airway obstruction localization system to accurately determine the obstruction plane.  In patients with obstructive sleep apnea hypoventilation syndrome (OSAHS), surgical intervention at the site of obstruction is currently one of the main treatment modalities, but polysomnography (PSG) does not provide information on the specific site of obstruction in the upper airway and has limited significance in specifying the surgical approach. Due to the lack of more accurate localization of upper airway obstruction, physicians are only performing simple uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (UPPP) for OSAHS patients under the guidance of PSG, but are unable to intervene at more specific sites of upper airway obstruction, making the overall effective treatment rate of surgery unsatisfactory.  In recent years, clinicians have made many explorations to localize the obstruction site, such as direct transoral observation or measurement, fiberoptic laryngoscopy with Muller test, craniofacial X-ray measurement, upper airway CT and 3D reconstructed airway assessment, MRI upper airway measurement and assessment, etc. Each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages, but almost all of them are monitored in the awake state, which is quite different from the upper airway obstruction in the natural sleep state . In the early days, the sensors and catheters used for upper airway pressure measurement were relatively large and thick, which were difficult for patients to accept and disturbed their sleep, making their application limited. The diameter of the catheter is only 2 mm, and it is very soft, which makes the patient’s compliance good and the interference with the patient’s sleep almost negligible, and it has good correlation with the PSG test results.