Inventors Develop Biometric Quality Control Process
William G. Cooper of Walnut, Calif., Curtis Parvin of Chesterfield, Mo., and George Cembrowski of Edmonton, Canada, have developed a process for implementing biometric quality control (QC).
According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, the invention relates to "systems and methods configured to guide and manage laboratory analytical process control operations. A Biometric QC process application is configured to monitor bias and imprecision for each test, characterize patient population data distributions and compare, contrast, and correlate changes in patient data distributions to any change in QC data populations."
An abstract of the invention, released by the Patent Office, said: "The Biometric QC process monitors the analytical process using data collected from repetitive testing of quality control materials and patient data (test results). The QC process identifies the optimal combination of, for example, frequency of QC testing, number of QCs tested, and QC rules applied in order to minimize the expected number of unacceptable patient results produced due to any out-of-control error condition that might occur."
The inventors were issued U.S. Patent No. 7,286,957 on Oct. 23.
The patent has been assigned to Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc., Hercules, Calif.
The original application was filed on May 2, 2005.