Intra- and interinstrument reproducibility of migration parameters in capillary electrophoresis for substance identification in systematic toxicological analysis

Abstract

Volunteer staff from a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) were presented with sets of anonymised physiological data recorded over approximately 45 minute periods from former patients. Staff were asked to select medical/nursing actions appropriate for each of the patients whose data were displayed. Data were shown in one of three conditions (a) as multiple line graphs similar to those commonly shown on the ward, or as textual descriptions generated by (b) expert medical/nursing staff or (c) computerised natural language generation (NLG). An overall advantage was found for the human generated text, but NLG resulted in decisions that were at least as good as those for the graphical displays with which staff were familiar. It is suggested that NLG might offer a viable automated approach to removing noise and artefacts in real, complex and dynamic data sets, thereby reducing visual complexity and mental workload, and enhancing decision‐making particularly for inexperienced staff. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Interlaboratory reproducibility of mobility parameters in capillary electrophoresis for substance identification in systematic toxicological analysis

“…The value for CZE is similar to the interinstrument mean RSD found earlier in a single laboratory (3.7%). However, the value for MEKC is significantly higher (mean interinstrument RSD 3.2%) [6].…”

“…However, when a search is performed to detect unknown analytes, internal standards could easily overlap with the unknown which then easily remain undetected. Therefore, we recently introduced a correction method using external standards to obtain the corrected effective mobility (m c eff ) as a new identification parameter in CE [2,6]. The reference mixtures should have properties that mimic those of the analyte(s) of interest.…”

“…Since the reference mixture is measured twice, the two corrected values are averaged to obtain the final value of m c eff . In previous intralaboratory studies, the correction method was tested on a single instrument [2] and between four instruments [6], using both CZE and MEKC for the analysis of sets of toxicologically relevant test compounds. In the first study [2], the between-day reproducibility (mean RSD value) of m eff was 1.1% for CZE and 0.6% for MEKC.…”

“…It was concluded that the impact of the correction method increases when the variation becomes larger. In the second study [6], the interinstrument reproducibility (mean RSD value) of m eff was 3.8% for CZE and 3.4% for MEKC. After correction, the reproducibility was almost similar and the mean RSD of m c eff was 3.2% for CZE and 3.9% for MEKC.…”

Les nouvelles technologies au service de la toxicologie clinique

“…Les problèmes de reproductibilité des paramètres d'identification dans le cadre de screening semble être bien résolus avec l'utilisation de la mobilité électropho-rétique efficace (23). L'efficacité de TEC dans la sépa-ration chirale reste à exploiter dans le domaine toxicologique.…”