Background As part of our lab accreditation requirements, we have to provide measurement uncertianty estimates for all tests at all hospital sites. As you might imagine, with thousands of testcodes in Sunquest LIS, getting all the coefficients of variation (CVs) represents a daunting task for the quality technologist to accomplish. ...

Background R dogma is that for loops are bad because they are slow but this is not the case in C++. I had never programmed a line of C++ as of last week but my beloved firstborn started university last week and is enrolled in a C++ intro course, so ...

MSACL Conference There are two RStats Data Science courses happening in Salzburg Austria on September 22–24, 2019 at the 6th annual MSACL Clinical Mass Spectrometry Conference. These courses are held twice annually, once in Europe and once in Palm Springs. Introductory Course The introductory course will be taught by Dan Holmes, MD ...

Background I like writing my academic papers in RMarkdown because it allows reproducible research. The cleanest way to submit a manuscript made in RMarkdown is using the LaTeX code that it generates using the YAML switch keep_tex = true. A minimalist YAML header would look like so: [crayon-5d640e2...

The Problem As Clinical Pathologists we work hard to create laboratory developed tests (LDTs) using liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) that are robust, repeatable, accurate and have a wider dynamic range than commercial immunoassays. In our experience, properly developed LC-MS/MS assays are much less expensive and ...

Background I was honoured by a site visit by Drs. Yeo-Min Yun and Junghan Song of the Korean Society for Clinical Chemistry a few weeks ago. As both professors are on the organizing committee of the Cherry Blossom Symposium for Lab Automation in Seoul in Spring 2016, their primary motivation for ...

Regression Methods In this post we will be discussing how to perform Passing Bablok and Deming regression in R. Those who work in Clinical Chemistry know that these two approaches are required by the journals in the field. The idiosyncratic affection for these two forms of regression appears to be ...

Removing NA’s from a Data Frame in R The Problem Suppose you are doing a method comparison for which some results are above or below the linear range of your assay(s). Generally, these will appear in your spreadsheet (gasp!) program as ( y) or, in the case of our ...

The Problem We want to have a closer look at the time–dependence of turn around times (TATs). In particular, we would like to see if there is a significant trend in TAT over time (improvement or deterioration) and we would like the data to inform us of slowdowns and ...