Childhood Adenotonsillectomy Trial

6.3 Certification of PRC Staff

6.3.1 Certification of the Chief Polysomnologist

The CP will be an experienced polysomnologist (>5 years experience in scoring), have a complete understanding of scoring rules and ability to articulate reasons for assigning epoch by epoch codes for sleep staging and respiratory events scoring.

6.3.2 Certification of Scorers

Each certified scorer will be required to:

• Demonstrate a complete understanding of scoring rules and ability to articulate reasons for assigning epoch by epoch codes for sleep staging and respiratory events scoring. This will be judged by review of several records with the CP or a physician-investigator.
• Demonstrate a level of agreement (within 10% for summary respiratory disturbance index (RDI) and sleep stages and 15% level of agreement for arousal index) with a second experienced polysomnologist (each scoring the same 10 records “blinded”).
• Demonstrate a 5% level of agreement (with-in scorer reliability) by scoring the same 10 records, at least one week apart.

Each novice scorer will be required to score 50 records under the supervision of a certified scorer. Ten of these records will be selected from a standardized score set. Data from these 10 records must show a 10% level of agreement with a senior scorer for summary respiratory disturbance index (RDI) and sleep stages and a 15% level of agreement for arousal index.

A certified scorer will review (epoch by epoch) the first 10 records scored by each novice scorer after certification. After that a random 20% of the first 100 records will be checked.