Specimen transport

Several preanalytical factors can cause a false elevation of the measured plasma ammonium concentration. These include prolonged tourniquet application, hemolysis, specimen transportation at room temperature, delay in plasma separation, and even ambient ammonium from cleaning agents or cigarette smoke. These fac-... 

Transportation of Specimens. Transportation involves getting specimens out of the source country and into the destination country. Many so-called underdeveloped countries have strict regulations regarding col-... 

Specimen transport The sample must reach the laboratory in the shortest time possible and the mode of transport should not alter laboratory findings in any way. Precise regulations have therefore been established for transportation. When mailing samples, the results may alter within the course of 2 days by as much as 10%. (l, 7)... 

Polypropylene and polyethylene containers are usually suitable for specimen transport. Glass should be avoided because of its tendency to break. Polystyrene is also unsuitable because it may crack when frozen. The containers must be leak proof and should have a Teflon-lined screw cap that does not loosen under the variety of temperatures to which the container may be exposed. The materials of both stopper and container must be inert and must not have any effect on the concentration of the analyte. 

The cost of specimen transport is often included in the fee of a referral laboratory for each test. Many referral laboratories either provide their own courier service or contract with large national companies to provide such services. 

Pneumatic tube systems provide rapid specimen transportation and are quite rehable when installed as point-to-point services. However, when switching mechanisms are introduced to allow carriers to be sent to various locations, additional mechanical problems may arise and cause carriers to be misrouted. Although pneumatic tubes have been reported to damage specimens because of rapid acceleration or deed-... 

Mobile robots have been used successfully to transport laboratory specimens both within the laboratory and outside the central laboratoiy. Further studies are required to establish the usefulness of mobile robots for specimen transport, but it is already apparent that mobile robot transportation win have many of the same limitations as the human messenger (e.g., batched specimen pickup and time delay in notifying of necessity for pickup). In a busy laboratory setting, however, delivery of specimens to lab benches by a mobile robot can be more frequent than human pickup and has been shown to be cost effective. ... 

We begin this section with discussions of the roles that workstations, instrument clusters, and workceHs have in laboratory automation, followed by discussions of specimen transportation, automated specimen processing, automated specimen sorting, and automated specimen storage and retrieval subsystems. 

Figure 1-18 Use of the conveyor system to sort specimens dynamically during specimen transport eliminates the requirement for separate equipment to sort specimens, but requires a more sophisticated conveyor system with numerous bar code reading stations and gates to direct the specimens to the appropriate workstation. (From Boyd JC, Felder RA, Savory J. Robotics and the changing face of the clinical laboratory. Clin Chem 1996 42 1901-10.)...

Automated capability to store and retrieve specimens on demand is an important aspect of automated specimen delivery systems. A few of the integrated systems described above (e.g, Beckman Coulter) offer specimen storage and retrieval modules as options in their systems. These robotic modules store specimens refrigerated in specific locations that are logged into a database maintained by the specimen delivery system. When a user requests a specific specimen to be retrieved, the robot is given commands to retrieve the specimen from the appropriate archived location and to route the specimen to the requested station using the specimen transportation system. 

Howanitz PJ, Sunseri DA, Love LA, Lohr A. Adapting mobile robotic technology to intralaboratory specimen transport Arch Pathol Lab Med 1996 120 944-50. 

Test request Order entry Collection scheduling Label generation Specimen collection Specimen transport... 

The control of preanalytical conditions or variables, such as test requests, patient preparation, patient identification, specimen acquisition, specimen transport, specimen processing, specimen distribution, preparation of work lists and logs, and maintenance of records (see Chapters 1 and 17). ... 

In controlling specimen transport, the essential feature is the authority to reject specimens that arrive in the laboratory in an obviously unsatisfactory condition (such as a thawed specimen that should have remained frozen). As with other QC procedures, a small number of problems are expected, but if the error rate gets too large, there is a necessity for systems analysis of transport procedures, with resulting modifications. In tests in which stability is a major problem, the design of specific control procedures appropriate for those tests may be necessary. 

FIGURE 17-8 A fully autonomous specimen transport system. 

Formaldehyde Specimen transport and fixation Standard 50-00-0 CH2O... 

---