World Sleep Day

Today on March 14, 2025 is World Sleep Day. 

A good reminder of how important healthy and sufficient sleep is for our health!

Sleep medicine is also of particular importance within Dresden University Medicine and thus at the Center for Medical Informatics (ZMI):

“Somnolink”, a national joint project of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII), in which Dresden is strongly represented by scientists from the ZMI and the Neurological Sleep Laboratory, has been running for a year: 

Prof. Dr. Martin Sedlmayr, Dr.-Ing. Miriam Goldammer, our head of the Data Science research area, and Franz Ehrlich from the ZMI, together with the scientific and medical director of the sleep laboratory, PD Dr. Moritz Brandt and Dr. Tony Sehr, form the Dresden Somnolink team.

Somnolink aims to improve the diagnosis, treatment and adherence to treatment of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) through the use of medical informatics and data science. 

OSA affects around 26 million people in Germany and significantly increases the risk of cardiovascular disease.

In Somnolink, sleep physicians and medical IT specialists from all over Germany are working hand in hand to improve the diagnosis and treatment of OSA with the help of artificial intelligence and high-quality health data. Nine interdisciplinary locations, including big data and ethics experts, are involved.

The focus is on five areas: 

✔ Early detection

Patient-centeredness and research engagement

✔ Public awareness and health impact

✔ Availability of sleep data for better care and research

FAIRness and sustainability of data infrastructures

Interoperability is a prerequisite for optimizing the diagnosis and treatment pathway as well as for training AI procedures. The Somnolink team is therefore particularly concerned with the harmonization of sleep medicine data. 

AI plays a crucial role, especially in better detecting OSA in women and supporting treatment. A core data set and methods for nocturnal sleep measurements have already been developed. 

The Dresden team led by Prof. Dr. Sedlmayr and PD Dr. med. Brandt is heavily involved in the Somnolink project and is leading the two work packages “Open science, cybersecurity and technical convergence” and “Early identification of patients in an inpatient context”. Initial work as part of the project has already been published https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-67022-9. 

Previous results have also been presented at the annual conferences of the German Society for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS) in September 2024 in Dresden, the German Society for Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine (DGSM), as well as on the international stage, at Sleep Europe in Seville in fall 2024.

In particular, the launch of the first studies and the development of the Somnolink hub for the exchange of sleep medicine data are planned for 2025. In addition, a team is currently being set up to develop a new “sleep medicine findings” extension module for the MII core dataset. 

The next focus of work will be the development of a model for the early detection of OSA using routine data from clinical care. To this end, we are working closely with the Dresden Data Integration Center (DIZ), which centrally indexes and structures the UKD's data in order to make it more usable for research.