Research

Researchers can click HERE for resources

Relevant sleep research links can be found HERE

 

Sleep and Behavioral Neuroscience Center (SBNC)

 


New video walk-through for participants & researchers!  Please click the link below to see our facilities from the comfort of your home:

Virtual Sleep Lab Tour


 

Resources

Laboratory: The Sleep and Behavioral Neuroscience Center (SBNC) is a 7,000-square ft. state-of-the-art clinical research center where sleep and other physiological studies are conducted. The SBNC is part of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and is located on the 13th floor of UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (WPH). WPH is linked both physically (by a tunnel) and organizationally to the hospitals UPMC Presbyterian and UPMC Montefiore. An on-call physician is located on the premises 24 hours per day, and all technical staff are certified in CPR. The SBNC is a research unit affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI; UL1 TR001857).

The facility is divided into six spacious bedrooms and two time-isolation apartments. Each room includes its own bathroom, audio/visual monitoring capabilities, TV, and personal computer. All rooms are equipped to monitor EEG sleep, EKG, respiration, oxyhemoglobin saturation, periodic limb movements, heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV), core body temperature, skin temperature, and mood and performance. In addition, each bedroom has a Compaq Model 450 computer for task testing (ie. EPRIME) and online questionnaires.

Participant Room

 

Additional space includes two technical/control rooms, two physiological testing areas, an exam room, subject preparation area, storage, and three lounge areas. Three of the bedrooms are equipped with ports which allow for IV administration of medications and blood sampling during sleep or wake studies. This laboratory also has the capability to perform studies requiring radionuclide injection for positron emission tomography (PET).

TMS Experimental Room

TMS Control Room

Child and Adolescent Resources: The SBNC is designed to accommodate concurrent studies in adults and minors, by providing secure and separate sections. The designated child and adolescent area include a testing room, a lounge, and two bedrooms. This area is locked and accessible by staff only, and the rooms and corridor are equipped with an audio-video system for added security. 

Children/Adolescent Lounge

Main Lounge

Equipment:​ 

The facility has two different models of onsite PSG acquisition systems, and two ambulatory/home collection PSG units for a total of 16 different acquisition units. Each is available for acquiring, processing and analyzing EEG sleep and additional modalities. Acquisition systems are comprised of the following:
• Eight Compumedics Grael HD-PSG on Dell-Mini Towers-Intel Core 7. The Grael systems may acquire High Definition EEG at 2048 SPM or 4096 SPM. These two laboratory systems can also monitor/record audio-video time synced with PSG collections.
• Two Electrical Geodesic high density 128 channel EEG 400 systems.
• Three Compumedics Siesta ambulatory PSG units collected via Dell Notebook Intel 7 with RadioLAN or WiFi monitoring.

A MindWare Physiology System complements the existing PSG/EEG systems by enabling the integration of EEG in addition to HRV, impedance cardiography, skin conductance, facial EMG and continuous blood pressure. In addition it includes audio-video capabilities that are synchronized with an Eprime computer and an ASL Eye Tracker 6 System. All of the modalities included in this single system allow for a more synchronous behavioral and physiological testing.

There are a total of ten ambulatory apnea screening devices (Five Resmed ApneaLink Plus and Five ResMed ApneaLink Air) which are maintained by the SBNC and provided to various study protocols for sleep disordered breathing (SDB) assessment. Data download and SDB analysis is then performed by SBNC Sleep Technologists.

Main Control Room

Computer:  All computers utilize the UPMC Western Psychiatric Office of Academic Computing (OAC) servers.  The OAC group is a shared resource and is funded by participating research projects in WPH and across the University of Pittsburgh. Using the networking infrastructure of UPMC, the SBNC shares multiple Microsoft and Linux server platforms.  All servers and workstations utilize archiving via LTO libraries.  These servers support, in varying degrees the following utilities:  FTP, file server, SQL/Access server database, digital analysis tape archiving and application development.  The OAC is an integrated part of the UPMC network with global Internet access behind a secure firewall.  Additionally, there is an onsite Project Manager that coordinates the data project needs of SBNC investigators and personnel.

Office: Physiological data processing is conducted in adjacent office space including an electronics laboratory, a computing operations laboratory, a computer server room, and adjacent offices. The computer operations laboratory contains 2 LINUX servers for signal analyses and processing, six Windows servers for database, file and web services, and space for media/document holding and archives. The adjacent computer server room consists of 210 square feet and houses all the servers for the Office of Academic Computing.

Office space is provided on the 13th floor of WPH for the program administrator, lead sleep technicians, electronics specialist, and software specialist.