Faculty Profile

Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
(J. Woodrow Weiss)
Cardiology Research Core Laboratory (Peter Kang)
Margret & H. A. Rey Institute for Nonlinear Dynamics in Medicine (Ary Goldberger)
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging (Kenneth Kwong)

The central theme of my research is integration of data obtained from diverse physiological measurement tools to better understand sleep and sleepiness. Functional neuroimaging has demonstrated the neurocircuitry vulnerable in sleep apnea, narcolepsy, and following sleep deprivation and fragmentation. Assessment of hypoxia effects relatively free from sleep fragmentation is ongoing. There are strong suggestions that residual symptoms in highly treatment compliant patients with sleep apnea are due to ongoing sleep fragmentation from "complex disease" - chemoreflex mediated or modulated upper airway obstruction.

The development of a ECG-based sleep spectrographic technique has provided profound insights into the nature of sleep that challenges the conventional characterization of sleep (staging, utility of delta power as an assay of sleep homeostatic drive, arousal scoring, respiratory event scoring). Sleep spectrograms are now being applied to rodent models of heart failure to between understand the temporal relationships between sleep fragmentation and heart failure. The hereditability of spectrographic phenotyping characteristics is being evaluated.

Matthew Weiss, MD (2006-2008); Leon Ting, MD (2004-2005); Matthew Curley, MD (2004-2005); Anne Laraia, MD (2004-2005); James Mojica, MD (2004-2005); Amjad Husain, MD (2004-2005); Lourdes Flaminiano, MD (2003-2004); Daniel Normal, MD (2003-2004); Amit Anand, MD (2003-2004); Geoffrey Gilmartin, MD, MMSc (2003-2005); Martha Praught, MD (2002-2004); Diwarkar Balachandran, MD (2001-2002); Arunabh Sharma, MD (1999-2000)

J. Woodrow Weiss, MD; Kenneth K. Kwong, PhD; Ary L. Goldberger, MD

NIH / NHLBI K23: Working memory in obstructive sleep apnea - an fMRI study. The purpose of this study is to use functional imaging to characterize the independent contributions of sleep deprivation, sleep fragmentation and hypoxia as mediators of cognitive dysfunction in sleep apnea syndromes.

NIH / NHLBI R21: ECG-based estimators of sleep physiology. The purpose of this project is to develop a new estimator of sleep physiology in the stability domain, using the Sleep Heart Health Study dataset.

Periodic Breathing Foundation: Positive Airway Pressure Gas Modulator
Development and pilot clinical testing of a device to stabilize sleep-breathing in those with complex forms of sleep apnea

Periodic Breathing Foundation: Development of the sleep spectrogram as a phenotyping tool in sleep-disordered breathing syndromes

Heart Rate Variability 2006
SLEEP 2006 (Biology of Sleep Hypoxia - II)

Books: Atlas of Sleep Medicine (Chokroverty, Thomas, & Bhatt; Elsevier, 2005),
Principles and Practice of Sleep Laboratory Medicine (Thomas & Guilleminault; Elsevier, 2007)

Thomas RJ. Sleep fragmentation and arousals from sleep-time scales, associations, and implications.
Clin Neurophysiol. 2006 Apr;117(4):707-11. Epub 2006 Feb 23. No abstract available. [PMID:16500146]

Thomas RJ. Effect of added dead space to positive airway pressure for treatment of complex sleep-disordered breathing.
Sleep Med. 2005 Mar;6(2):177-8. Epub 2005 Jan 25. No abstract available. [PMID: 15716223]

Thomas RJ, Daly RW, Weiss JW. Low-concentration carbon dioxide is an effective adjunct to positive airway pressure in the treatment of refractory mixed central and obstructive sleep-disordered breathing.
Sleep. 2005 Jan 1;28(1):69-77. [PMID: 15700722]

Thomas RJ, Rosen BR, Stern CE, Weiss JW, Kwong KK. Functional imaging of working memory in obstructive sleep-disordered breathing.
J Appl Physiol. 2005 Jun;98(6):2226-34. Epub 2005 Jan 27. [PMID: 15677733]

Thomas RJ, Terzano MG, Parrino L, Weiss JW. Obstructive sleep-disordered breathing with a dominant cyclic alternating pattern--a recognizable polysomnographic variant with practical clinical implications.
Sleep. 2004 Mar 15;27(2):229-34. [PMID: 15124715] 

Thomas RJ. Arousals in sleep-disordered breathing: patterns and implications.
Sleep. 2003 Dec 15;26(8):1042-7. [PMID: 14746388]