In the 70ies of the last century, ther term "preanalytical phase" was introduced in the literature. This term describes all actions and aspects of the "brain to brain circle" of the medical laboratory diagnostic procedure happening before the analytical phase. The author describes his personal experiences in the early seventies and the following history of increasing awareness of this phase as ...

conclusions our case highlights the fact that the tip of the pulmonary artery catheter can easily advance into a peripheral branch of the pulmonary artery and cause pulmonary venous blood to be sampled instead of pulmonary arterial blood. a variety of monitoring techniques are needed to confirm accurate catheter placement. background pressure and waveform at the catheter tip are continuously mo...

Commercially available blood-collection tubes may be contaminated with endotoxin (315 +/- 95 pg/tube) and could therefore be unsuitable for blood collection for endotoxin measurement. Plasma separation and storage are a potential source of contamination. To avoid contamination and error, we have developed new blood collection tubes that contain heparin free of endotoxin (LPS) and a gel to separ...

BACKGROUND This study addresses the modelling and simulation of blood collection for fixed blood collection sites in a medium-sized large French city, as well as mobile blood collection in urban and rural environments. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS Formal Petri net models were used to describe all relevant donor flows of the various blood collection systems; the Petri net models were converted ont...