Appropriate quality of test results is fundamental to the work of the medical laboratory. How to define the level of quality needed is a question that has been subject to much debate. Quality specifications have been defined based on criteria derived from the clinical applicability, validity of reference limits and reference change values, state-of-the-art performance, and other criteria, depen...

Indicators are used to quantify the pressure of pesticides on the environment. Pesticide risk indicators typically require weighting environmental exposure by a no effect concentration. An indicator based on spread equivalents (ΣSeq) is used in environmental policy in Flanders (Belgium). The pesticide risk for aquatic life is estimated by weighting active ingredient usage by the ratio of their ...

A short-time exposure on the concentration--time relationship base, a classification of substances according to the degree of hazard and the program for assessing safety coefficients have been suggested in order to predict the basic toxicometric parameters (chronic exposure thresholds, maximum allowable concentrations, safety coefficients, and others).

The problem of the sensitivity analysis of color scanning filters is addressed in this paper. The second differential of the mean square DeltaE(ab) error provides a means of calculating the sensitivity of the mean square DeltaE(ab) error to filter fabrication errors. Tolerances on the allowable change in the mean square DeltaE(ab) error are used to define bounds on the filter fabrication errors...

The impact of the mismodelling in the Earth’s geopotential coefficient C22 on the detection of the general relativistic Lense-Thirring and gravitomagnetic clock effects is investigated. The systematic error induced on the Lense-Thirring LAGEOS experiment amounts to almost 1%. Regarding the gravitomagnetic clock effect, the systematic error induced on the satellite’s azimuthal location is 1-2 or...

Geometric matching under uncertainty is a long-standing problem in computer vision. This paper presents a simple and efficient algorithm for finding globally optimal solutions to geometric matching problems under a wide variety of allowable transformations (translations, isometries, equiform transformations, others) and a wide variety of allowable feature types (point features, oriented point f...

Color quantization is often used to convert 24-bit RGB images to 8-bit palette-table images. However, in some cases, the imposed 8 bits per pixel may be too stringent to adequately represent the image. For other images, 8 bits per pixel are unnecessarily generous. For image storage and transmission, it is important to compress an image as much as possible without exceeding an allowable level of...

The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA 88) (1 ) have caused great changes not only in US laboratories but in clinical laboratories throughout the world. CLIA’s requirements for preand postanalytical control were harbingers of more complete approaches to the implementation of quality systems in clinical laboratories, such as the quality model just introduced by the National...