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ABSTRACT
Profile Data Banks are extended collections of dive profiles
with conditions and outcomes. To validate tables, meters,
and software within any computational model, profiles and
outcomes are necessarily matched to model parameters with
statistical rigor. Profile-outcome information is
termed a Data Bank (DB) these days, and there are a couple
of them worth discussing. Others will surely develop along
similar lines. Their importance is growing rapidly in technical
sectors, not only for the information they house but also
for application to diving risk analysis plus table, software,
and meter tuning. Environmental impacts of temperature, currents,
and equipment can also be examined. We discuss the collective
impacts of two specific Data Banks on technical diving, that
is, what we have learned from profiles stored therein. Info
needed by the DBs and statistics are also presented, and methods
used to digest data are summarized. Of particular interest
to technical divers are DB information gleaned about temperature
effects on Scapa Flow divers, reduced risk correlated with
Doppler measurements of deep stops, DCS risk and BMI, shallow
versus deep stop risk equivalence, and the C&C Team 20
dive RB sequence to 420 fsw.
The first DB is the DAN Project Dive Exploration (PDE) collection.
The PDE collection focuses on recreational air and nitrox
diving up to now, but is extending to technical, mixed gas,
and decompression diving. Approximately 137,451 profiles reside
on PDE computers with some 41 cases of DCS across the air
and nitrox recreational diving. PDE came online in the 1995,
under the guidance of Dick Vann and Petar Denoble. DAN Europe,
under Alessandro Marroni, joined forces with DAN USA in the
2000s extending PDE. Their effort in Europe is termed Dive
Safe Lab (DSL). DSL has approximately 50,000 profiles with
8 cases of DCS In combo, PDE and DSL house some 187,451 profiles
with 49 cases of DCS. The incidence rate is 0.0003 roughly.
This is a massive and important collection. Another more recent
DB focused on technical, mixed gas, decompression diving is
the Data Bank at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL DB).
Therein some 2,879 profiles with 20 cases of DCS reside. The
Author and C&C Team are mainly responsible for bringing
the LANL DB online in the early 2000s. Much of the LANL DB
rests on data extracted from C&C Dive Team |
