ACC: GE's Holter algorithms alert CV staff to undiagnosed sleep apnea
GE Healthcare introduced the Mars Virtual Sleep Lab (VSL), a device that provides a quantitative sleep apnea analysis from any GE-monitored inpatient bed, at the 59th annual American College of Cardiology (ACC) conference in Atlanta.

Additionally, the MARS VSL links into GE's Carescape CIC Pro—a central station monitor that assimilates real-time and historic patient data from various monitoring sources—so a quantitative Holter analysis can now be performed from GE connected patient beds, according to the company.

MARS VSL reports on clinical data that is critical for making a sleep apnea diagnosis, such as apnea hypopnea index,sleep staging and respiratory events, according to the company The device is powered by the WideMed Morpheus Hx sleep apnea diagnosis program and enables obstructive sleep apnea diagnosis from the hospital bed. This transforms inpatient rooms into virtual sleep labs, GE said.

According to a recent study, connecting the WideMed automated sleep analysis system to hospital monitors achieves results highly correlated with the standard test conducted in sleep labs— polysomnography (J Clin Sleep Med 2010;Vol. 6, No. 1).

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