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 ...

Test results are commonly interpreted against population-based reference (normal) intervals, which should be provided on every laboratory report, irrespective of whether the test has been done as point-of-care testing or in a clinical laboratory. Reference intervals are difficult to generate properly if international ...

The significance of good practice during the pretesting phase of clinical laboratory investigation cannot be overemphasized. The production of high-quality, accurate results, which are clinically useful, depends as much on practice before the patient’s sample reaches the laboratory as it does on the analytical phase...

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....

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 ...

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...

Disturbance of the mechanisms which maintain normal blood pH is a defining feature of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), an acute and life-threatening complication of the chronic metabolic disease, diabetes.  For this reason diagnosis and monitoring of DKA invariably include measurement of arterial blood gases. This...

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 ...