Category pftblog

I have been searching through Pulmonary Function videos on YouTube in order to find ones I thought would be useful for technician education. So far what I’ve found have been intended either f…

 In a recent post on the AARC Diagnostics forum a PFT Lab manager asked how long they need to keep database records. The ostensible reason for this was that they had too many years of records and h…

When it comes to spirometry, it’s really all about FEV1. FVC and the FEV1/FVC ratio are also important of course, but because FVC is more likely to be underestimated than FEV1 they are less r…

Pulmonary patients have been using personal peak flow meters for several decades and I started to seeing patients that had their own oximeter over 10 years ago. Within the last couple of years a nu…

My lab stopped inserting A-lines to get arterial blood samples during exercise testing well over 10 years ago. Our decision was partly based on the fact that we didn’t do them often enough to…

The most common problem we have with helium dilution FRC tests are leaks. Although the system tubing and spirometer bell leak occasionally, we do have valve failures relatively frequently. Valve fa…

The first reasonably accurate flow-measuring device was the Fleisch pneumotachograph which was developed in 1925. Originally the Fleisch pneumotach bounced a light beam off a mirror mounted on a di…

It’s been several decades since I last saw water-seal bell spirometers being used in a Pulmonary Function lab. They have been displaced mostly by systems that use flow sensors of one type of …

The primary goal of a Cardio-Pulmonary Exercise Test (CPET) is to determine an individual’s maximum oxygen consumption (VO2), minute ventilation (Ve) and heart rate (HR). An adequate CPET is …

For the last couple of years it seems that I’ve had more problems than usual with lung volume tests. Even though this seems to date from the time that my lab went through its hardware and sof…