Neonatology, perhaps more than any other field in medicine, has undergone dramatic improvements in care over the last several decades. One of the main areas of advancement is the ability to mechanically ventilate premature infants with a variety of neonatal lung conditions. As survival of premature infants has...

Today’s blood gas sensors are the result of many years of gradual improvements and optimizations. The operating principles behind sensor technology have largely remained unchanged, even though the size of analyzers and thus of sensors has decreased remarkably.  However, miniaturization has created a new challenge: to ...

About half of all newborn infants born at term develop jaundice during their first days of life, and the lower the gestational age the more frequent the jaundice is. Newborns develop hyperbilirubinemia because of a large bilirubin production, low hepatic excretion and enterohepatic recirculation. At birth the newborn ...

Almost as soon as healthcare providers began ventilating neonates with respiratory distress syndrome, the problem of chronic lung disease began. How to manage these children in a way to promote lung growth and disease-free survival has been the question for those involved in the care of these infants since that time....

The introduction of armband barcode scanning capabilities to point-of-care glucose testing devices has been shown to greatly reduce patient identification errors. Barcodes may be scanned to identify operators, patient identification and reagents. Barcode scanning, however, does not eliminate all errors, and in some...

Biochemical and hematological analyses are done in laboratories, clinics, general practices and in point-of-care settings such as ITU.  Generally, numerical test results are generated.   Test results vary in individuals over time due to preanalytical variation, analytical imprecision and biological variation. The...

A specimen for clinical laboratory testing must be properly collected from the correct patient at the correct time with proper patient preparation, and the right test must be performed for answering the right question. Quality in the preanalytical phase of laboratory activity can be assured by implementing a quality...

To assess anemia and reduced oxygen-carrying capacity, a measurement of hematocrit and/or hemoglobin is performed. Whether hemoglobin or hematocrit is preferred depends on different needs and is often determined by tradition.  Both hematocrit and hemoglobin are important hematology parameters for diagnosing...

Blood gas analysis at the point of care plays an important role during and after an open-heart surgery. acutecaretesting.org recently talked to Prof. Knut Kleesiek, MD, Director of the Institute for Laboratory and Transfusion Medicine of the Heart and Diabetes Center North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany, to find out more ...

50-75 % of all newborns develop jaundice during their first week of life [1,2,3]. The decision behind which treatment is necessary and when it should be initiated is based upon a measurement of the concentration of total bilirubin (ctBil) in serum, plasma or whole blood.  It is therefore obvious that it is important...