Chemistry International
Vol. 24, No. 6
November 2002
IUPAC Projects
Properties
and Units for Transfusion Medicine and Immunohaematology
Unambiguous
expression of properties will assist in fulfilling safety and legal
requirements in the handling of blood products intended for transfusion
and organs intended for transplantation. The C-NPU (Committee on Nomenclature,
Properties and Units)maintained as a joint activity of the International
Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC) and
IUPAChas as its main task to promote and maintain scientifically
and conceptually sound ways of expressing the outcome of measurements
and other examinations in laboratory medicine. The NPU coding scheme
and vocabulary, based on the international system of units, concepts
theory, and high-level international standards, is the main outcome
and should be the cornerstone for expressing measurements within international
communication standards. Thus, the task in this project is to work out
properties and units for transfusion medicine and tissue typing based
on the former CNPU concepts and syntactic rules.
It is
a characteristic of the fields of transfusion medicine and tissue typing
that the properties examined may involve both nominal, ordinal, differential,
and rational scales. Thus, the project will establish the metrological
and logical basis for expressing such properties. In addition, the necessary
international coding scheme identifiers and code values will have to
be chosen as required by interlaboratory transmission between databases.
In this respect, active collaboration and/or endorsement by the International
Society of Blood Transfusion will be sought.
For more
information, contact the Task Group Chairman Urban
Forsum <[email protected]>.
www.iupac.org/projects/2001/2001-059-1-700.html