Showing papers by "Marco Parvis published in 2001"
19 May 2001
TL;DR: A virtual environment that allows efficient development of distributed measurement applications based on the Java language so that it can be used on different platforms and is easily extensible to accommodate new processing tasks, interfaces and instruments.
Abstract: This paper describes a virtual environment that allows efficient development of distributed measurement applications. Most of the details associated with the set up of complex measurement systems are hidden to the programmers, so that most programmable instrument can be easily integrated and managed. The environment is based on the Java language so that it can be used on different platforms and is easily extensible to accommodate new processing tasks, interfaces and instruments.
16 citations
21 May 2001
TL;DR: A travelling standard is described, which call be used for the calibration of many commercially available acquisition boards, which can be remotely exercised by a calibration laboratory through the PC which hosts the board that has to be calibrated.
Abstract: The large use of measurement systems based on data-acquisition boards makes the traceability-chain assurance a tricky problem, due to the difficulty in consistently calibrating such boards. In this paper the authors describe a travelling standard, which call be used for the calibration of many commercially available acquisition boards. By employing such a travelling standard, the calibration procedure can be remotely exercised by a calibration laboratory through the PC which hosts the board that has to be calibrated. In such a way the calibration results refer to environmental, software and hardware conditions that exactly match the board operating conditions. Furthermore, the board unavailability time is drastically reduced, with a consequent economic advantage for the board owner. The travelling standard embeds a micro-controller, which is responsible for the communication with the PC that hosts the board and for the board-stimulus generation, and a digital multimeter, which acts as a reference standard.
7 citations
TL;DR: A processing technique that can be used to combine information from different medical analyses to discriminate between different pathologies that have similar symptoms and is based on mixed neural-and-conventional processing.
Abstract: This paper describes a processing technique that can be used to combine information from different medical analyses to discriminate between different pathologies that have similar symptoms. The paper is focused on the differentiation between asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema, using only functional noninvasive tests, but the proposed technique can be easily applied to other similar situations where different tests have to be used to identify a pathology. The technique is based on mixed neural-and-conventional processing that not only suggests the pathology, but also estimates the reliability of this suggestion.
4 citations
21 May 2001
TL;DR: Two different procedures are proposed: one approach can be used if the wattmeter is used on an FFT algorithm, while another longer procedure is able to characterize any kind of wattmeters.
Abstract: A procedure for the estimation of digital-wattmeter sensitivity with respect to the presence of spurious components in the acquired signals is proposed in this paper The procedure allows an analytical estimation of such a sensitivity to be obtained if the spectral-analysis algorithm of the wattmeter under investigation is completely known; otherwise, an experimental estimation is required Two different procedures are proposed: one approach can be used if the wattmeter is used on an FFT algorithm, while another longer procedure is able to characterize any kind of wattmeters Both experimental procedures can be performed by employing a simple test-set, which is based on two commercial signal generators and on a Personal Computer
1 citations
TL;DR: The problems related to the estimation of the uncertainty when the indicators are computed by means of a nontrivial processing on recorded traces of clinical parameters are dealt with.
Abstract: Noninvasive medical analyses are a convenient method to study several pathologies even though their indirect nature often requires a complex processing to determine the relevant health "indicators." The usefulness of such indicators depends on the employed model, but also on the uncertainty that is connected to the complex processing involved in the indicator determination. This paper deals with the problems related to the estimation of the uncertainty when the indicators are computed by means of a nontrivial processing on recorded traces of clinical parameters. The paper is focused on the analysis of expired gas traces, but the procedure can also be applied to many other cases where the processing involves manual or automatic selection of suitable "key points" on repetitive traces.
1 citations
21 May 2001
TL;DR: An application is described that performs an oxygen/carbon dioxide analysis on a multi-breath basis and estimates the result uncertainty and a skeleton of the software which carries out the routine tasks has been designed and installed on the PC.
Abstract: The analysis of gas-concentration changes at mouth during normal breathing is nowadays a routine exam to infer lung functionality and several commercial instruments are available to carry out this kind of measurement. Unfortunately, most of these measuring systems are very specific, designed to be used in the hospital and costly. This paper describes a complete and versatile system which is designed for field use and can be tailored to several different measurement situations. The proposed system employs commercial sensors coupled to a versatile conditioning and acquisition board, which is designed to be connected to a conventional PC. A skeleton of the software which carries out the routine tasks (acquisition, storing, calibrations, and visualization) has been designed and installed on the PC. The skeleton can be easily adapted to the different applications, thus enabling the fast development of new clinical methodics. As an example, in this paper, an application is described that performs an oxygen/carbon dioxide analysis on a multi-breath basis and estimates the result uncertainty. The skeleton contains routines to save both results and raw data according to the DICOM standard format, so that the analyses can be easily shared among the different physicians involved in the patient's care.