Clinical and diagnostic virology

Molecular techniques for clinical diagnostic virology.

A decade after the first studies were performed it is justifiable to claim that molecular techniques have revolutionised the work of the clinical virology laboratory. Hitherto, the role of the virology laboratory was often a retrospective diagnosis based on virus isolation and serology. Nevertheless, the epidemiological data collected in this way justified the continued activity of clinical vir...

Verification and validation of diagnostic laboratory tests in clinical virology.

This review summarizes major issues of verification and validation procedures and describes minimum requirements for verification and validation of diagnostic assays in clinical virology including instructions for CE/IVD-labeled as well as for self-developed ("home-brewed") tests or test systems. It covers techniques useful for detection of virus specific antibodies, for detection of viral anti...

Clinical Virology.

An evolutionary change in diagnostic virology.

The earliest laboratory diagnoses of viral infections were made by microscopy just after the turn of the twentieth century. Animal and egg inoculation were the methods of choice until tissue culture and serology accelerated the field of diagnostic virology during the fifties and sixties. More rapid methods, including electron microscopy, immunoassays, and nucleic acid probes, are now available ...

Diagnostic virology in a community hospital.

Seven and one-half years of experience in a small diagnostic virology laboratory of a large inner-city hospital are reported. Seven hundred fifty-one viruses were isolated from over 8,000 specimens, using two types of tissue culture cells, human and monkey kidney. The most common isolates were Herpes simplex viruses (HSV) and Enteroviruses. Similar results have been reported by larger laborator...