Open Oral Cavity Has Little Effects on Upper Airway Aerodynamics in Children with Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome: A Computational Fluid Dynamics Study Based on Patient-Specific Models

Abstract Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) is a common disorder with recurrent pharyngeal airway collapse and sleep disruption. Recently, great progress has been made in investigating the physical mechanism of OSAS development and treatment using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). However, previous studies always neglected the oral cavity artificially in the patient’s upper airway CFD model, but did not give any specific explanation. The oral cavity effect on the OSAS upper airway flow is still a matter of unclear. This paper reconstructed the patient-specific upper airway models based on the cone beam computed tomography images of ten children subjects (seven boys and three girls) and used CFD to simulate both the steady and unsteady expiration and inspiration states in the upper airway model with or without the oral cavity. A series of pressure measurement experiments based on the in vitro 1:1 scaled airway model were performed to validate the reliability of the present CFD methods. Finally, the CFD results indicate that the open oral cavity is almost a region of flow stasis with constant pressure, and both the upper airway aerodynamics with and without the oral cavity have the similar trends, with the maximum average relative difference less than 6%. The present study shows that the open oral cavity causes very little impacts on the upper airway flow of the children patients with OSAS using the nasal respiration only, and confirms the reasonability of ignoring the oral cavity for CFD simulation.