Valid exposure assessment and biomonitoring of toxicants rely on standardized specimen collection, handling, storage, and measurement. In a study designed to determine organochlorine concentrations in blood samples, we recruited participants from registered anglers in Michigan. After participants were interviewed, blood was collected from study subjects, either at home by a phlebotomist or in a...

BACKGROUND Clinical practice guidelines aim to enhance patient safety by reducing inappropriate variations in practice. Despite considerable efforts to enhance the use of clinical practice guidelines, adherence is often suboptimal. We investigated to what extent workplace affiliation explains variation of self-reported adherence to venous blood specimen collection regarding patient identificati...

  Objective: As a consequence of stat turnaround times (TATs) chronically exceeding 60 minutes, our laboratory was facing pressure to divert limited resources toward the implementation of an emergency department satellite laboratory. Peer-reviewed literature in clinical laboratory quality assurance and improvement indicates that between 60-70% of errors occur at the pre-analytical level.  Thus...

INTRODUCTION Gingiva is a common site for reactive, non-neoplastic, and neoplastic lesions with unspecific clinical features (Fig. 1): desquamative gingivitis as expression of mucocutaneous diseases (lichen planus, pemphigus, pemphigoid, plasma-cell gingivitis, lupus erythematosus), preneoplastic lesions (gingival verrucous proliferative leukoplakia), and gingival enlargements (gingival fibroma...

BACKGROUND Accurate quantification of mRNA in whole blood is made difficult by the simultaneous degradation of gene transcripts and unintended gene induction caused by sample handling or uncontrolled activation of coagulation. This study was designed to compare a new blood collection tube (PAXgene Blood RNA System) and a companion sample preparation reagent set with a traditional sample collect...

For biodiversity research, the field of study that is concerned with the biological diversity of our planet, it is of utmost importance that the location of an animal specimen find is known with high precision. Due to specimens often having been collected over the course of many years, their accompanying geographical data is often ambiguous or may be very imprecise. In this contribution, we det...

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is a declarative rulebased concurrent committed-choice programming language. Petri nets are a well-known formalism for modeling and analysis of concurrent processes. We aim to develop a framework to exploit Petri nets as a tool for the modeling and analysis of CHR programs. In this paper, we show that place/transition nets can easily be embedded into CHR and we d...

X-ray microanalysis of frozen-hydrated tissue sections permits direct quantitative analysis of diffusible elements in defined cellular compartments. Because the sections are hydrated, elemental concentrations can be defined as wet-weight mass fractions. Use of these techniques should also permit determination of water fraction in cellular compartments. Reliable preparative techniques provide fl...