QUALITY cONTROLS

The statistical quality control (SQC) techniques can be efficiently exploited to improve the quality of services as well as the products. These tools helps to identify the assignable causes of variation in quality from that of the chance causes, so that proper remedial measures can be taken at right time in order to improve the quality of services. Paramedical services are to be promptly handled to provide quality service to the patients preferably inpatients for their utmost satisfaction. The present study aims at analyzing the time taken to deliver different paramedical services to the patients admitted in selected Hospital, Bhubaneswar. Here we identify the pitfalls of the system in delivering such services and suggested some remedial measures in order to improve the quality of various paramedical services.

Wood heat treatment has increased significantly in the last few years and is still growing as an industrial process to improve some wood properties. The first studies on heat treatment investigated mainly equilibrium moisture, dimensional stability, durability and mechanical properties. Mass loss, wettability, wood color, and chemical transformations have been subsequently extensively studied, while recent works focus on quality control, modeling, and study the reasons for the improvements. This review explains the recent interest on the heat treatment of wood and synthesizes the major publications on this subject on wood properties, chemical changes, wood uses, and quality control.

Research for this paper was funded by the National Honey Board to provide a basis for industry dialogue on the need for a quality assurance program. The paper provides a background perspective on economic adulteration, industry perspectives on the extent of economic adulteration in the U.S. honey industry, estimates of potential economic impacts, and a discussion of trends and issues relevant to economic adulteration.

Objectives: Genetic variation in genes encoding for drug-metabolizing enzymes, drug targets and signaling pathways have proven to contribute significantly to differences in drug response. Pharmacogenetics is now expanding from clinical pharmacological research to its application in clinical practice. Genotyping of patients in a routine clinical setting requires robust and reliable genotyping methods. Materials & methods: A survey of pharmacogenetic association studies for quality control samples published from 2005 to 2007 in the two most prominent pharmacogenetic journals, and development of plasmid-derived external controls. Results: Surveying journals revealed that only a minority of papers report the use of quality controls, and no standard procedures are applied. We established 12 plasmid-derived external controls and applied these in pharmacogenetic testing. Conclusion: There still is a need for quality control materials, especially for application in pharmacogenetic testing. ...

PANGAEA is an information system for processing, long-term storage, and publication of georeferenced data related to earth science fields. Essential services supplied by PANGAEA are project data management and the distribution of visualization and analysis software. Organization of data management includes quality control and publication of data and the dissemination of metadata according to international standards. Data managers are responsible for acquisition and maintenance of data. The data model used reflect the information processing steps in the earth science fields and can handle any related analytical data. The basic technical structure corresponds to a three tiered client/server architecture with a number of comprehensive clients and middleware components controlling the information flow and quality. On the server side a relational database management system (RDBMS) is used for information storage. The web-based clients include a simple search engine (PangaVista) and a data mining tool (ART). The client used for maintenance of information contents is optimized for data management purposes. Analysis and visualization of metainformation and analytical data is supported by a number of software tools, which can either be used as ‘plug-ins’ of the PANGAEA clients or as standalone applications, distributed as freeware from the PANGAEA website. Established and well-documented software tools are the mini-GIS PanMap, the plotting tool PanPlot, and Ocean Data View (ODV) for the exploration of oceanographic data. PANGAEA operates on a long-term basis. The available resources are sufficient not only for the acquisition of new data and the maintenance of the system but also for further technical and organizational developments.

The aim of this research is to describe quality control procedures, procedures for validation and measurement uncertainty (MU) determination as an important element of quality assurance in food microbiology laboratory for qualitative and quantitative type of analysis. Accreditation is conducted according to the standard ISO 17025:2007. General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories, which guarantees the compliance with standard operating procedures and the technical competence of the staff involved in the tests, recently are widely introduced in food microbiology laboratories in Croatia. In addition to quality manual introduction, and a lot of general documents, some of the most demanding procedures in routine microbiology laboratories are measurement uncertainty (MU) procedures and validation experiment design establishment. Those procedures are not standardized yet even at international level, and they require practical microbiological knowledge, a...

Over 10% of the annual production of 100 million tons of sweetpot atoes in China is processed int o starch, mostly in small scale enterprises using manual or simple mechanized equipment. The starch is used mainly for noodle production, but food and other industrial uses are developing in some regions of the country. Export of both starch and noodles to

In this work estimation of measurement uncertainties associated with the total metal content in soils was done by an intralaboratory approach based on method validation and quality control data, and using two certified reference materials (CRM). CRM and soil samples were analyzed following procedures based on the methods that are applied to silicate materials. All elements were determined by atomic absorption spectrometry following a quality assurance program previously established. Quality control actions were implemented in order to provide reliable data. The precision under within-laboratory reproducibility conditions was estimated from triplicate analysis. The trueness component was determined as recovery of the analyte from CRMs: soil sample, SO-2 and river clay sediment, LGC 6139. Combined measurement uncertainty was expressed in terms of precision and recovery uncertainties and the later further split on CRM replicate analysis and uncertainty of the certified value components. The results obtained are critically discussed on the basis of the different contributions. For the selection of the reference material, the CRM dependent terms are critically compared in order to fulfill specific requirements.

This paper presents an assessment of the potential impact, at the exporter level, of implementing industry-wide uniform production and post-harvest practices in snow pea farming that are consistent with US Good Agricultural Practice guidelines. Data were obtained from a survey ...

Standardized protocols and methods for virological monitoring are mandatory for the correct surveillance of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infection in transplanted patients receiving pre-emptive therapy. Fifteen Italian viral diagnostic laboratories belonging to different transplantation centers participated in the external Quality Control Programme for Molecular Diagnostics of HCMV-DNA by using two in-house and five commercial methods for HCMV-DNA quantification. The different methods shared 100% specificity, and sensitivity reached 100% when samples containing > 1,000 copies/ml were considered. The variability range was wide (about 2 log10) for samples containing a lower amount of HCMV-DNA (< 1,000 copies/ml), but it decreased with increasing concentrations of HCMV-DNA. For HCMV-DNA levels > or = 5,000 copies/ml, the different methods provided results within a +/- 0.5 log10 variability range, while the 80% range (range in which 80% of results obtained will fall) was within...

ABSTRACT A quality control (QC) procedure is applied to the Challenging Minisatellite Payload (CHAMP) level-2 Global Position System (GPS) radio occultation (RO) data provided by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC) Data Analysis and Archival Center (CDAAC). It consists of a range check removing negative values, a biweight check removing data which deviate from the biweight mean by more than four times the biweight standard deviation, another biweight check removing data with large deviations to the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) analysis, and finally a symmetric check removing the negative bias of GPS observations in the low troposphere below 4 km. These four QC checks are applied sequentially to identify outliers in GPS bending angle and refractivity data at each vertical level using data primarily in the month of March 2004. Having removed 5.5% outlier data, the GPS RO observations compared much more favorably with the NCEP analyses than the original data without QC, resulting in an improved spatial consistency, a more symmetric probability distribution, significantly reduced error variances, and a nearly diagonal vertical error correlation matrix. The effectiveness of the proposed QC procedure is further confirmed by showing that most RO profiles removed by the QC procedure proposed in this study have those characteristic physical parameter values indicating poor quality of RO data. Similar results are obtained when the same QC procedure is applied to CHAMP data in July 2002, which shows the robustness of the proposed GPS QC procedure.

An original scheme to automatically generate control point pairs for image registration in a progressive way is presented here. It consists of three stages of processing. In the first stage, the Voronoi-Delaunay dual graph is used to predict the optimal location for a new control point to be generated. Second, a target-defined interest operator is designed to extract feature points from the predicted area. In the third stage, a hierarchical templet matching procedure is applied. A global consistency check by robust estimation to improve its reliability is also included.

Fractional Brownian motion is a surface model through which the topographic surface may be described. This model provides a simple method for estimating the fractal dimension of a digital elevation model. By computing the fractal dimension value at different directions, interpolation artifacts may be revealed, contributing to digital elevation model quality assessment.

In Tanzania, there is paucity of data for monitoring laboratory medicine including haematology. This therefore calls for audits of practices in haematology and blood transfusion in order to provide appraise practice and devise strategies that would result in improved quality of health care services. This descriptive cross-sectional study which audited laboratory practice in haematology and blood transfusion at Muhimbili National Hospital (MNH) aimed at assessing the pre-analytical stage of laboratory investigations including laboratory request forms and handling specimen processing in the haematology laboratory and assessing the chain from donor selection, blood component processing to administration of blood during transfusion. A national standard checklist was used to audit the laboratory request forms (LRF), phlebotomists' practices on handling and assessing the from donor selection to administration 6f blood during transfusion. Both interview and observations were used. A to...