2013年5月10日 · Late last week however, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma. The test results for a patient with a helium dilution TLC that was 68% of predicted but at the same time with a VA that was 93% of predicted and a DLCO that was 129% of predicted came across my desk. Continue reading →

2019年11月6日 · The 2019 ATS/ERS Spirometry Standards were recently released. The standards are open-access and can be downloaded without charge from the October 15th issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

2013年3月4日 · When we went through our hardware and software upgrade last August, one of the changes we made was to stop reporting the FEF25%-75% (AKA MMEF, MMFR, MMF). The pulmonary physicians had long since stopped using this value when assessing spirometry results and we had kept it on our reports as long as we did only for inter-laboratory compatibility.

2013年1月19日 · A report with some odd lung volume results came across my desk and I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what the numbers are telling me about test quality. What concerned me was the 15% discrepancy between the VA from the DLCO and the TLC measured by plethysmography.

2014年8月21日 · I was contacted recently by a reader who is trying to resurrect an older test system. It is a Spirotech S600, manufactured by Graseby-Andersen and outfitted for spirometry, helium dilution lung volumes and single-breath DLCO.

2023年5月14日 · One of the overlooked parts of teaching pulmonary function interpretation is developing an appreciation for the number and variety of errors that the equipment, patients and technicians can produce and how they affect the reported test results. I routinely run across a couple dozen errors each week while reviewing reports.

I am a 66 year old female and I am diagnosed with NSIP (more cellular than fibrotic). My Spirometry test results are good having been tested earlier this month. FEV(1) is 2.09 (103% predicted - up from 58% predicted in May 2016) and my FVC(L) is 2.22 (91% predicted up from 52 in May ). Both results have increased gradually over the last nine ...

2019年6月8日 · Almost all pulmonary function test systems seem to come with a module that can perform a computerized interpretation of PFT results. Their accuracy has been studied occasionally, often by the developers of a particular algorithm and …

2017年2月17日 · I’ve noticed that every so often DLCO results change significantly without a change in spirometry (or lung volumes) or there’s a modest change in spirometry and a marked change in DLCO. I’ve been concerned that this may be a symptom of problems with our DLCO (CO/CH4) gas analyzers and at least once recently this kind of discrepancy did ...

2017年2月15日 · The test systems I am familiar with are pretty much limited to being able to determine back-extrapolation and whether end-expiratory flow rates meet ATS-ERS end-of-test criteria. So far they have not attempted to assess spirometry efforts for the cough or glottal closure that are also part of the ATS-ERS criteria for test quality.