OBJECTIVE: In obstructive sleep apnea patients on continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment there is growing evidence for a significant impact of the type of mask on the residual apnea-hypopnea index (rAHI). Here, we propose a method for automatically classifying the impact of mask changes on rAHI. METHODS: From a CPAP telemonitoring database of 3,581 patients, an interrupted time series design was applied to rAHI time series at a patient level to compare the observed rAHI after a mask-change with what would have occurred without the mask-change. rAHI time series before mask changes were modelled using different approaches. Mask changes were classified as: no effect, harmful, beneficial. The best model was chosen based on goodness-of-fit metrics and comparison with blinded classification by an experienced respiratory physician. RESULTS: Bayesian structural time series with synthetic controls was the best approach in terms of agreement with the physician.s classification, with an accuracy of 0.79. Changes from nasal to facial mask were more often harmful than beneficial: 13.4% vs 7.6% (p-value < 0.05), with a clinically relevant increase in average rAHI greater than 8 events/hour in 4.6% of cases. Changes from facial to nasal mask were less often harmful: 6.0% vs 11.4% (p-value < 0.05). CONCLUSION: We propose an end-to-end method to automatically classify the impact of mask changes over fourteen days after a switchover. SIGNIFICANCE: The proposed automated analysis of the impact of changes in health device settings or accessories presents a novel tool to include in remote monitoring platforms for raising alerts after harmful interventions.

We demonstrate COVIZ, an interactive system to visually form and explore patient cohorts. COVIZ seamlessly integrates visual cohort formation and exploration, making it a single destination for hypothesis generation. COVIZ is easy to use by medical experts and offers many features: (1) It provides the ability to isolate patient demographics (e.g., their age group and location), health markers (e.g., their body mass index), and treatments (e.g., Ventilation for respiratory problems), and hence facilitates cohort formation; (2) It summarizes the evolution of treatments of a cohort into health trajectories, and lets medical experts explore those trajectories; (3) It guides them in examining different facets of a cohort and generating hypotheses for future analysis; (4) Finally, it provides the ability to compare the statistics and health trajectories of multiple cohorts at once. COVIZ relies on QDS, a novel data structure that encodes and indexes various data distributions to enable their efficient retrieval. Additionally, COVIZ visualizes air quality data in the regions where patients live to help with data interpretations. We demonstrate two key scenarios, ecological scenario and case cross-over scenario . A video demonstration of COVIZ is accessible via http://bit.ly/video-coviz.