Developing a customized approach for strengthening tuberculosis laboratory quality management systems toward accreditation

Posted on January 16, 2018 By Shawn Douglas Journal articles

Published in early 2017, this paper by Albert et al. discusses the development process of an accreditation program — the Strengthening Tuberculosis Laboratory Management Toward Accreditation or TB SLMTA — dedicated to better implementation of quality management systems (QMS) in tuberculosis laboratories around the world. The authors discuss the development of the curriculum, accreditation tools, and roll-out across 10 countries and 37 laboratories. They conclude that the training and mentoring program is increasingly vital for tuberculosis labs, "building a foundation toward further quality improvement toward achieving accreditation ... on the African continent and beyond."

SistematX, an online web-based cheminformatics tool for data management of secondary metabolites

Posted on January 8, 2018 By Shawn Douglas Journal articles

Dereplication is a chemical screening process of separation and purification that eliminates known and studied constituents, leaving other novel metabolites for future study. This is an important part of pharmaceutical and natural product development, requiring appropriate data management and retrieval for researchers around the world. However, Scotti et al. found a lack of secondary metabolite databases that met their needs. Noting a need for complex searches, structure management, visualizations, and taxonomic rank in one package, they developed SistematX, "a modern and innovative web interface." They conclude the end result is a system that "provides a wealth of useful information for the scientific community about natural products, highlighting the location of species from which the compounds were isolated."

Rethinking data sharing and human participant protection in social science research: Applications from the qualitative realm

Posted on December 28, 2017 By Shawn Douglas Journal articles

Social science researchers, like any other researchers, produce data in their work, both quantitative and qualitative. Unlike other sciences, social science researchers have some added difficulties in meeting the data sharing initiatives promoted by funding agencies and journals when it comes to qualitative data and how to share it "both ethically and safely." In this 2017 paper, Kirilova and Karcher describe the efforts of the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University, considering the variables that went into making qualitative data available while trying to reconcile "the tension between modifying data or restricting access to them, and retaining their analytic value." They conclude that such repositories' goals should be towards "educating researchers how to be 'safe people' and how to plan for 'safe projects' – when accessing such data and using them for secondary analysis – and providing long-term 'safe settings' for the data, including via de-identification and appropriate access controls."

Handling metadata in a neurophysiology laboratory

Posted on December 22, 2017 By Shawn Douglas Journal articles

Metadata capture is important to scientific reproducibility argue Zehl et al., particularly in regards to "the experiment, the data, and the applied preprocessing steps on the data." In this 2016 paper, however, the researchers demonstrate that metadata capture is not necessarily a simple task for an experimental laboratory; diverse datasets, specialized workflows, and lack of knowledge of supporting software tools all make the challenge of metadata capture more difficult. After demonstrating use cases representative of their neurophysiology lab and make a case for the open metadata Markup Language (odML), the researchers conclude that "[r]eadily available tools to support metadata management, such as odML, are a vital component in constructing [data and metadata management] workflows" in laboratories of all types.

ISO 15189 accreditation: Navigation between quality management and patient safety

Posted on December 12, 2017 By Shawn Douglas Journal articles

In this 2017 paper by Plebani and Sciacovelli of the University Hospital of Padova, the duo offer their insights into the benefits and challenges of a clinical laboratory getting ISO 15189 accredited. Noting that in the European theater "major differences affect the approaches to accreditation promoted by the national bodies," the authors discuss the quality management approach that ISO 15189 prescribes and why its worth following. The conclude that while laboratories can realize "world-class quality and the need for a rigorous process of quality assurance," it still requires a high level of awareness among staff of the importance of ISO 15189 accreditation, an internal assessment plan, and well-defined, "suitable and user-friendly operating procedures."