Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
FWIW, my personal TTF indication is a GF8k of < 13.5% (from a similar analysis of the Navy ascent table, using the minimum GF8k across various depths). The Navy guidance might indeed be considered a bit conservative when compared to some of the Duke results, and there's even a table illustrating that in the full proceedings. And perhaps it is overly conservative to apply the same rule to a week's worth of diving. Everyone has to choose their own threshold in that gray area.
I think the confusion is that as divers we associate AGE with a lung over expansion injury. However arterial gas embolism occurs when gas bubbles enter or form in the arterial vasculature and occlude blood flow. A lung over expansion injury is not the only way that can occur.
Then why do we even distinguish between DCS and DCI?
Congratulations, that's amazing -- how did you lose over half your body weight?
From the standpoint of symptoms and response to treatment we may well not, and that very argument as been put forth. That is one of the reasons that the Navy now recommends the same chamber treatment protocol for AGE and severe DCS. Dive profiles do help confirm a diagnosis - if a diver has a history of a panic ascent and presents with sudden-onset stroke-like symptoms that began two minutes after reaching the surface, we can be reasonably confident in our diagnosis and decision to treat in the chamber vs. sending for imaging to rule out a stroke and starting TPA (although they'll likely still get imaging before reaching the chamber anyway). The same symptoms with sudden and dramatic onset soon after surfacing in a different diver who's made back-to-back deep decompression dives and has a prior history of severe neurological DCS would help shore up a diagnosis of decompression sickness possibly related to arterialized VGE. We'd treat both divers on a U.S. Navy Treatment Table 6. In many instances, the distinction between the two more influences diver education, decisions on future diving, and follow-up treatments than the treatment itself. We'd have one type of conversation with diver #1 and a completely different type with diver #2.
Might consider changing your handle too >> "Little Aladdin" 
