INTRODUCTION The Standardised Mortality Ratio (SMR) is increasingly used to compare the performance of different healthcare providers. However, it has long been known that differences in the populations of the providers can cause biased results when directly comparing two SMRs. This is potentially a particular problem in neonatal medicine where units provide different levels of care. METHODS ...

Automatic generation of kidney regions of interest for radionuclide renograms is possible by defining a reference image and reference regions, using a non-linear image registration algorithm to map a totalised image from a patient to the reference image and using the mapping produced to map the predefined reference regions back onto the patient image. The accuracy of the automatically derived r...

Thyrotropin (TSH) concentrations were measured in 1580 hospitalized patients and 109 normal persons. Using the mean +/- 3 SD limits of the log values for the controls (0.35-6.7 milli-int. units/L), the proportion of abnormal TSH results in the hospitalized patients was 17.2%. TSH was undetectable (less than 0.1 milli-int. unit/L) in 3.1% of patients, suggesting hyperthyroidism, and high (greate...

CA 125 is an antigenic determinant expressed by greater than 80% of nonmucinous epithelial ovarian carcinomas. An immunoradiometric assay has been developed using a murine monoclonal antibody (OC125) to quantitate CA 125 in human serum. This immunoradiometric assay was optimized for specificity, sensitivity, and performance characteristics. Using a simultaneous immunoradiometric assay, the mean...

We compared results obtained from two parathyrin (parathyroid hormone) assays with differing specificities, using sera from 172 normal donors and from 98 patients with disorders of calcium regulation. Intact parathyrin was measured in both assays; the C-parathyrin assay also measured the 53-84 amino acid C-terminal hormone fragment; the N-parathyrin assay also measured the 1-34 N-terminal fragm...