Principles of Analysis Flashcards
What is a definitive method?
A method of exceptional scientific accuracy suitable for certification of reference material
What is a reference method?
A method demonstrating small inaccuracies against definitive method
What is a Routine Method?
Method deemed sufficiently accurate for routine use against reference method and standard reference materials (SRM)
What are examples for Cholesterol?
Definitive Method: ID/GC/MS Isotope dilution/gas chromatography/mass spectrometry
Reference: Abell-Kendall method
- Hydrolysis of cholesterol esters with alcoholic KOH
- Extraction of total cholesterol with hexane for 15mins -> dried in vacumn
- Treated with acetic acid/acetic anhydride/sulphuric acid 30mins ->Abs 620nm
Routine Method: Enzymatic Method
- Cholesterol esters + cholesterol esterase → free cholesterol
- Cholesterol oxidase → cholestene-3-one + H2O2
- 4-aminoantipyrine + phenol → red quinoneimine dye Abs 540/600nm
What is a Primary Standard?
A substance of known chemical composition and high purity that can be accurately quantified and used for assigning values to materials and calibrating apparatus
What is a Standard Reference Material?
Reference material issued by an institute whose values are certified by a reference method which establishes traceability
What is the secondary standard?
A commercially produced standard for routine use calibrated against a primary standard or reference material
What is the internal standard?
- A substance not normally present in the sample. Added to both standard and sample to correct for variation in conditions between different samples run – e.g. HPLC, GC, MS.
- The internal standard is also used to verify instrument response and retention time stability.
What are Calibrator Requirements?
- Prepared from pure substance
- Stable and homogenous material
- Matrix similar to assay matrix e.g. serum
- No chemical interferences
- If possible should be obtained commercially to minimise error
What are calibrator values?
Commercially available calibrators have a concentration with a particular value:
- Stated value – no certification
- Assigned value – given arbitrarily or derived using a non-reference method
- Certified value – certification of value by particular institute or body
- Standard Reference Method TM value – derived used a reference method
What is Traceability?
An unbroken chain of comparisons of measurements leading to a reference value
What makes a Good method?
- Analytical Accuracy: Measure of agreement between a measured quantity and true value
- Analytical precision: Measure of agreement between replicates
Why is accuracy and precision required for result to be effective clinically?
- Precision is important for following course of disease/monitoring therapy i.e. reproducibility
- Accuracy is important for diagnosis since measured value is compared to reference range
- For screening precision and accuracy are important to avoid false positives and false negatives
What is verification and validation?
- Verification – confirmation, through provision of objective evidence, that the specified requirements have been fulfilled.
- Validation – confirmation, through provision of objective evidence, that the requirements for a specific intended use or application have been fulfilled.
What guidelines are used in the assessment of assay performance?
ISO 15189 : 2012 Medical laboratories – Requirements for quality and competence
What is trueness?
- Difference between true and measured value
- The measure of trueness is systematic error or bias
- The idea is that a measurement is true when it is aimed squarely at the centre
- Trueness and precision are independent of one another
How is Trueness measured?
- Repeat analysis of multiple levels of certified reference materials.
- Results are compared with the assigned value
- Recovery experiments
- Comparison with results from “fresh” EQA material
- Correlation with a current/accepted method using patient samples (comparability)
What is Precision?
- Results are clustered
- The degree of precision can be measured by quantifying the overall effect of all random errors