Abstract
By George A Fritsma and David L McGlasson
Washington, DC: AACC Press, 2012
54 pp, Price £12.74
ISBN: 978-1-59425-141-2
This is a pocket size reference book that aims to provide the numerical skills for laboratory scientists to develop, modify and validate laboratory instruments and assays to meet rigorous quality standards. The authors also hope to promote understanding amongst service users as to how reliability is built into laboratory assays.
Topics covered include statistical terms, determination of accuracy, validation of new or modified assays, lot-to-lot comparisons, reference interval and therapeutic range, internal quality control, clinical efficacy measurements and receiver operating characteristic curves. Although this information is available elsewhere, the authors have done a valuable service in bringing it all together into a pocket-sized book for easy reference. Inevitably, due to the constraints on space this imposes, the text tends to be descriptive rather than explanatory, e.g. instructions are given to calculate degrees of freedom without any explanation of the underlying concept. In some instances (e.g. Student’s t-test), the formulae are not even given. However, a useful set of references completes the book, directing the reader to further sources of information.
This short book is a useful, concise and convenient source of information for the laboratory but is unlikely to provide the depth of cover, already available in standard textbooks, required by trainee clinical scientists.