Patterns in clinical chemistry requests

[摘要] For each patient sample that is presented to the clinical chemistrylaboratory a combination of various tests can be requested. Thiscombination or profile will depend on the condition of the patient,and hence also on the requesting hospital department. Severaltechniques were applied to detect and describe patterns in testsrequested by the cardiology, hepatology and nephrology sections ofthe out-patient's Department for Internal Medicine. Comparisonof the frequencies of ordering the tests showed significantdifferences between these sections. Cluster analysis and multidimensionalscaling were used to show similarities and differencesin the test profiles that were used by the sections. These techniquesare useful for generating hypotheses, but the statistical significanceof the clustering found is difficult to assess.

[学科分类] 分析化学