The level of misunderstanding and misrepresentation (whether due to ignorance or bias) in these discussions is appalling. Let’s deal with facts:
STATISTICS (available daily, and for consecutive date ranges):
While most information is on the “Daily Details” page,
Note 1: this appears on “Long Term Trend” page near the beginning.
Note 2: this appears on “Therapy Data Summary - All Data” page at end.
Note 3: you could add up the daily minutes at each pressure, but the total is not provided.
Encore Viewer divides its statistical information onto separate “nightly” and “multiple consecutive night” report pages. For the data items marked by notes 1 and 2, nightly information is available only if the report is run for just a single day.
The Encore Viewer also provides utilization time and index information, broken down by pressure level categories (from 4 to 20), which can provide very interesting and useful information. (Its title, "Daily Events Per Hour", though, is misleading.)
The absence of Flow Limitation (or “flattening”) and snore information from ResScan is unfortunate, since ResMed sensors do recognize this information (and the AutoPAP algorithm responds to it, and it is reported when the ResLink attachment is used), but it is not reported.
The Encore Viewer distinction between “obstructive” and “non-responsive” apneas is a reflection of the algorithm operations and assumptions, rather than a “reporting software” issue: Respironics will increase pressure twice in response to an apnea; if it resolves than it was (in retrospect) an obstructive apnea; otherwise it was (in retrospect) a “non-responsive” (read, “possibly central”) apnea, and pressure is reduced. ResMed bypasses this matter by not responding to apneas (in the absence of flattening or vibratory snore) when pressure is over 10cm.
GRAPHICS
Both software packages display nightly pressure and leak rate as a continuous graph, though the presentations differ slightly. The ResScan software, in addition, allows expansion of the time axis, permitting examination of detail up to minute-by minute values.
The Encore Viewer displays a “tick mark” for each occurrence of each of the six event types for which it provides indices. ResScan displays the duration of apneas in both analog (by the length of the graph bar) and digital (by the number of seconds in a box at the top of each bar) format. Contrary to the interpretation by some, Encore Viewer does NOT display the duration of each event; bars of repeated “ticks” display repeated occurrences which may or may not be continuous. Encore Viewer does not display duration of apneas. Neither program displays duration of hypopneas (and given each system’s technical definition of “hypopnea”, the notion of “duration” may hardly be meaningful.) While ResScan does not display hypopneas as such, each “rise” in the AHI graph line does in fact indicate the occurrence of a hypopnea (or an apnea), and with practice can be easily read as such.
DATA AVAILABILITY
ResMed did a great disservice to everyone (users and clinicians) when it eliminated the capability of “exporting” into Excel minute-by-minute detail data from its AutoScan software when it was replaced by the current ResScan software. While it re-introduced some limited export function into version 3.7, there remains no useful access to the underlying data. Further, I am aware of no mechanism for retrieving the underlying data from either the ResScan card nor from the ResScan stored data files.
Unlike the Respironics Encore Pro software, which used a SQL database (which is so well utilized by James Skinner in his Encore Pro Analyzer add-on), the Encore Viewer stores its data in unreadable .bin files located in C:\Documents and Settings\”your computer name”\Application Data\Respironics\EncoreViewer\Data. There are three primary files: EncoreViewer.bin (which is recreated each time the program is used), Patient1.bin (which identifies each user to distinguish between multiple users), and “gobbledygook”.bin (which contains the cumulative downloaded data). I am not aware of any way to access these files outside the program. HOWEVER, each time the EncoreViewer runs a report, a decodedSC.xml”1234567”.xml file is left in C:\Neo\SCDecodedFiles. (The program does not clean up after itself, and these files proliferate.) These files ARE readable and, with some manipulation, can be moved into Excel, useful sections isolated, and every-30-seconds data for pressure and leak can be extracted. Times, but NOT durations, of apneas can also be extracted. This process, however, is quite labor-intensive, and I do not generally find it worth the bother. Games can be played with copying and/or renaming and/or archiving both the .bin and the .xml files.
In summary, neither software package is ideal, and each has some functionality which the other lacks. Depending on what you wish to do with the data, the differences may be trivial, or critical. I strongly suspect that for most users, the differences are trivial. To criticize either generally as significantly “deficient” with respect to the other reflects little thoughtful analysis, probably little experience working with both system, and an overdose of personal preference raised to unjustified levels.
Velbor
