Spirometric Measurement Postprocessing: Expiration Data Recovery

Spirometry deals with finding and predicting respiratory system pathologies through instrumentation that mainly carries out measurements on the volume and the air flow expired from lungs. In many cases, during spirometric and pneumotachographic trials in hospital, there are people who are not able to begin or to complete their tests because of diverse difficulties due to presumable pathologies. Hence, these trials may be lost if they are not recovered and postprocessed in adequately, at least to display the expiration trend and step. This paper presents rapid techniques of helping physiopathologists to extract information from a noncomplete expiration curve as spirometric postprocessing. The two techniques are based on work of breath (WOB) and controlled genetic algorithm (CGA), respectively. A comparison is performed between the two techniques; the WOB is calculated by assuming classes of fixed resistance R according to the age, to the sex, to the previous pathologies, etc., while the CGA technique provides a strict monitoring of GA steps in order to reduce uncertainty of final results.