Based on safety and quality principles, for each medical device (MD), regardless of its declared status as single- or multi-use device, careful considerations must be made. This includes assessment whether reprocessing is economical and ecological meaningful, and technical feasible. So far, however, in Germany reprocessing of declared single use MD is legally allowed, provided that the above as...

As infection-related issues have become one of the most important concerns in endoscopy centers, proper reprocessing of endoscopes has attracted great interest. Compliance with established guidelines for reprocessing is critical to prevent pathogen transmission. However, hospital compliance with guidelines has not been satisfactory. To increase compliance, efforts have focused on developing new...

BACKGROUND AND STUDY AIM Worldwide some endoscopy units routinely continue to use manual reprocessing techniques for disinfection of side-view endoscopes. The aim of this study was to evaluate the outcome quality of manual reprocessing techniques for removal and inactivation of the bioburden from side-view endoscopes used for endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) in a tertiary r...

BACKGROUND/AIMS There is a growing emphasis on quality management in endoscope reprocessing. Previous surveys conducted in 2002 and 2004 were not practitioner-oriented. Therefore, this survey is significant for being the first to target actual participants in endoscope reprocessing in Korea. METHODS This survey comprised 33 self-filled questions, and was personally delivered to nurses and nur...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW This article reviews recent publications relevant to endoscope reprocessing and the potential for transmission of infection during gastrointestinal endoscopy. RECENT FINDINGS There have been a number of established reprocessing failures of gastrointestinal endoscopes at various healthcare facilities across the US resulting in patient notifications. These episodes have been a...

BACKGROUND It has been recommended that bronchoscopists familiarize themselves with national recommendations for bronchoscope reprocessing practices, but the extent of guideline awareness is unclear. METHODS We distributed a survey to practicing bronchoscopists at two meetings. Questions addressed infection control issues related to bronchoscopy and specific reprocessing recommendations. RE...

This paper presents a novel approach to soft decision decoding for binary linear block codes. The basic idea of this approach is to achieve a desired error performance progressively in a number of stages. For each decoding stage, the error performance is tightly bounded and the decoding is terminated at the stage where either near-optimum error performance or a desired level of error performanc...

Inadequate flexible endoscope reprocessing has been associated with infection outbreaks, most recently caused by carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. Lapses in essential device reprocessing steps such as cleaning, disinfection/sterilization, and storage have been reported, but some outbreaks have occurred despite claimed adherence to established guidelines. Recommended changes in these guid...

(GI) endoscopy has been widely used as a clinical diagnostic procedure in Korea since the introduction of the National Cancer Screening Program in 1999. Moreover, the use of endoscopic procedures to treat GI disorders is increasing rapidly. A review article published in 1993 reported 281 instances of pathogen transmission attributed to GI en-doscopy between 1966 and 1992. 1 A recent review foun...