4,147 research outputs found

    FEASIBILITY AND VALIDATION OF TELESPIROMETRY IN GENERAL PRACTICE: THE ITALIAN "ALLIANCE" STUDY

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    SummaryIntroductionAt variance from office spirometry, telespirometry has not been tested as a tool for improving the ability of general practitioners (GPs) to manage chronic airway diseases.MethodsAfter adequate training, 937 Italian GPs agreed to perform telespirometry in subjects attending their clinics who had risk factors, persistent respiratory symptoms, or a previous diagnosis of asthma or COPD. Each subject performed at least three forced expiratory manoeuvres using a turbine spirometer. Traces were sent by telephone to a Telespirometry Central Office, where they were interpreted by a pulmonary specialist, according to defined criteria. The result was sent in real time to the GP to assist the management of the patient.ResultsDuring 2 years, 20,757 telespirometries were performed, with a mean of 22.2±25.2 examinations for each GP. 70% of the tests met the criteria for good or partial co-operation, allowing spirometric abnormalities to be detected in more than 40% of the tracings. The rate of telespirometries that could not be evaluated at all was reasonably low (9.2%). For a subset of the telespirometries, a comparison between acceptability criteria for telespirometry and those recommended for laboratory (ATS) or office spirometry showed that the majority of telespirometries with good co-operation satisfied completely, or with minor deviations, the ATS and Office criteria.ConclusionsTelespirometry was well accepted by Italian GPs, who obtained acceptable screening traces in a large percentage of subjects. Therefore it might be considered a useful alternative to office spirometry in improving the management of chronic airway diseases by GPs

    The FM and PL Libraries Documentation

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    Building complex SPMD code in an ecient and portable way is nowadays a challenge, especially when there is no uniformity of tools and libraries across platforms. The Fast Messages (FM) and the Portability Library (PL) where both designed to provide the basis of an abstract enough framework for C, so that problems can be coded and ported to any supported platform with no more than a few changes in the makeles and a recompilation. The FM library provides a message passing communications library built around the Berkeley Active Messages library. The PL library provides the primitives for host to node communication for problem initialization and results collection, as well as other miscellaneous and potentially non-portable primitives. This technical report contains the documentation for both libraries.Technical report LCSR-TR-25
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