Neuron-specific enolase (NSE) is the most sensitive and specific tumor marker for small-cell lung cancer (SCLC). We evaluated a new monoclonal IRMA (Sangtec) for NSE and compared it with a polyclonal RIA (Pharmacia) in patients with SCLC or other lung cancers (NSCLC). We measured NSE concentrations in 100 healthy subjects (NI group), 100 patients with benign pulmonary diseases (BPD group), and ...

BACKGROUND Variability among assays used to measure intact parathyroid hormone (iPTH) is of particular concern because of the routine use of iPTH assay results to guide management of osteodystrophy and calcium metabolism in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which results from commercially available iPTH assays diverge from results...

BACKGROUND Our renin IRMA overestimated renin in plasmas with high prorenin-to-renin ratios. We suspected that the overestimation of renin was caused less by cross-reactivity of the renin-specific antibody with prorenin than by a conformational change of prorenin into an enzymatically active form during the assay. METHODS Because the inactive form of prorenin converts slowly into an active fo...

In this work, a concept for coupling a system for content-based image retrieval in medical applications (IRMA) with hospital information systems is presented. We aim at improving the work flow of radiologists and evaluating the recognition performance of the IRMA system in clinical routine. The integration is designed such that a failure of IRMA does not affect the routine operation of the othe...

Three methods for quantifying skeletal alkaline phosphatase (ALP; EC 3.1.3.1) activity/immunoactivity in serum--heat inactivation, wheat germ agglutinin (WGA) precipitation, and an immunoradiometric assay--were tested for recovery and specificity and applied to 81 sera collected from 14 postmenopausal osteoporotic subjects. The heat-inactivation and WGA precipitation assays showed relative reco...

An immunoradiometric assay (Boots-Celltech's "Sucrosep"; IRMA) for thyrotropin (TSH) was evaluated and results were compared with those of our in-house RIA procedure. The IRMA had a sensitivity of 0.02 milli-int. unit/L. In addition it displayed excellent intra- and inter-batch precision, cross-reacted negligibly with other pituitary hormones, and appeared to be relatively free of matrix effect...

Using improved selection techniques, we isolated four monoclonal antibodies with high affinity for human thyrotropin (Ka = 1.6 X 10(8) to 2.6 X 10(10) L/mol). We used two of these in an immunoradiometric assay (IRMA) that also incorporates a novel phase-separation technology (Sucrosep TSH IRMA, Boots-Celltech). This assay's very low detection limit for TSH (0.03-0.08 milli-int. unit/L) and wide...

This paper presents an integrated routing and MAC scheduling algorithm (IRMA) for improving system performance in multihop wireless mesh networks. The IRMA approach is motivated by the fact that conventional contention-based MAC protocols such as 802.11 do not perform well in combination with independent ad hoc routing protocols such as DSR, DSDV or AODV due to interactions between neighboring ...