Laboratory Medicine

Copyright © 2013 Mina Hur et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Clinical laboratories have a vital role to play in translating research findings into clinically useful measurements. This involves assessment of new procedures to ensure that they are analytically valid and also continually integrating the findings from new studies into routine practice. These important tasks are covered in this special issue on laboratory medicine which includes a wide variety of laboratory-related topics as illustrated by three review articles and 12 research papers. The first review article by D.-H. Ko et al. comprehensively examines the methods available for haptoglobin typing and discusses the characteristics, clinical applications, and limitations of each method. A. Noto et al. describe the role of neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) for managing acute kidney injury and the potential benefits derived from the combined clinical use of urine NGAL and metabolomics in kidney disease. The third review by E. Urrechaga et al. looks at new laboratory biomarkers for hypochromia including their clinical significance and utility in daily practice. Several papers examine issues in diagnostic hematology, one of the traditional areas of laboratory testing. Y. Nam et al. assess hypercoagulability using a relatively new thromb-omodulin-induced thrombin generation assay (TGA) in patients with liver cirrhosis. They show that, although routine coagulation tests did not detect the thrombotic tendency in cirrhosis, the TGA could detect hypercoagulability in cirrho-sis. The paper by M. Hur et al. emphasizes that prothrombin time international normalized ratio (INR) measurements by point-of-care testing coagulometers still need to be confirmed with INR measurements in the laboratory. H. R. Lee et al. evaluate the relationship between mean platelet volume (MPV) and characteristics of cord blood (CB) units and shows that MPV may be one of the most useful parameters to assist with making decisions about the priority for processing specimens in the cord blood bank. F. Chongliang et al., in their interesting study on complete blood counts, suggest that a model that uses levels of neutrophils, lymphocytes, and platelets is potentially useful in the objective evaluation of survival time or disease severity in unselected critically ill patients. Three interesting papers come from the areas of serol-ogy/immunology, chemistry, and microbiology. K. Lee et al. evaluate the overall efficacy of reverse sequence screening for syphilis (RSSS) …