PubMed · 6047688
The source did not provide an abstract. Follow the original record for more information.
Explore connections, maps & timelines
R R Kelly. Automation.. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6047688/
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.
KEEP EXPLORING
The present paper describes the design of an integrated system to aid in the taking and measurement of manual blood samples during nuclear medical examinations requiring blood sampling. In contrast to previously published systems, the present system is not used in the actual sampling of the blood, but aims to aid in all other aspects of handling and measurement. It consists of two main parts. One part is a distributed software system running on the scanner host computer used to register sample times, to display information pertaining to the ongoing examination and to collect data from a number of well crystals. The other main part consists of an industrial robot used to perform the actual weighing, centrifugation, pipetting and measurement of the samples. The system has been operational for 6 years, during which time it has had an "up-time" in excess of 95% and has handled and measured the blood samples from more than 5000 examinations, each comprising an average of 15 blood samples. The throughput of the system is 50 whole blood samples or 21 plasma samples per hour. In addition it has to a large extent removed the "human factor" from the process, thereby increasing the reliability of the data.
A high-performance liquid chromatographic method with ultraviolet detection is described for the simultaneous measurement of pyrimethamine and sulphadoxine in human plasma. After an automated liquid-solid extraction on a C8 cartridge, the compounds are separated on a C18 column by isocratic elution; the mobile phase is methanol-acetonitrile-water (10:25:65, v/v/v) with triethylamine (1%) and adjusted to pH 5.6 with phosphoric acid. The eluent is monitored with an ultraviolet detector at 240 nm. The limit of quantification was 10 ng/ml for pyrimethamine and 22 microg/ml for sulphadoxine. No chromatographic interferences can be detected from endogenous compounds, other anti-malarial drugs or major drugs used for the treatment of children. Sulphadimethoxine is used as an internal standard. The method is accurate and precision is good with relative standard deviations lower than 6%. The chromatographic procedure takes 11 min. The method is comparatively rapid, simple, sensitive and can be used for therapeutic drug monitoring, clinical and pharmacokinetic studies.
An expert system for determining resonance assignments from NMR spectra of proteins is described. Given the amino acid sequence, a two-dimensional 15N-1H heteronuclear correlation spectrum and seven to eight three-dimensional triple-resonance NMR spectra for seven proteins, AUTOASSIGN obtained an average of 98% of sequence-specific spin-system assignments with an error rate of less than 0.5%. Execution times on a Sparc 10 workstation varied from 16 seconds for smaller proteins with simple spectra to one to nine minutes for medium size proteins exhibiting numerous extra spin systems attributed to conformational isomerization. AUTOASSIGN combines symbolic constraint satisfaction methods with a domain-specific knowledge base to exploit the logical structure of the sequential assignment problem, the specific features of the various NMR experiments, and the expected chemical shift frequencies of different amino acids. The current implementation specializes in the analysis of data derived from the most sensitive of the currently available triple-resonance experiments. Potential extensions of the system for analysis of additional types of protein NMR data are also discussed.