A hands-on introduction to medical physics and radiation therapy for middle school students.

Lesson plans were developed to present concepts of medical physics and radiation therapy to a middle school audience. These workshop learning units relied on hands-on participation and collaboration within student groups to acquaint students with computed tomography simulation and treatment planning processes. These lesson plans were delivered at two different educational outreach programs targeted at student groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

West Nile virus testing experience in 2007: evaluation of different criteria for triggering individual-donation nucleic acid testing.

Background: In 2007, clients served by Blood Systems Laboratories used variable approaches for triggering West Nile virus (WNV) RNA individual-donation (ID) nucleic acid testing (NAT). These included two minipool (MP) NAT-reactive donations and a greater than 1:1000 rate in a 7-day interval (primary trigger), criteria based on one MP-NAT-reactive donation when there was WNV activity in overlapping and/or adjacent geographic areas (neighbor trigger), or zero MP-NAT-reactive donation (self-trigger).

Study Design And Methods: The Procleix WNV assay was used in either a 16-sample MP or an ID format.

Evaluation of a new Trypanosoma cruzi antibody assay for blood donor screening.

Background: This multicenter prospective study was designed to evaluate the performance characteristics of a new commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for the detection of antibodies to Trypanosoma cruzi in blood donors, the ORTHO T. cruzi ELISA Test System (Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics).

Study Design And Methods: Assay specificity was evaluated among 40,665 serum and ethylenediaminetetraacetate (EDTA) plasma specimens from volunteer blood donors and 481 T.

Clinical significance of nondiscriminated reactive results with the Chiron Procleix HIV-1 and HCV assay.

Background: A NAT was developed (Procleix multiplex, Chiron Corporation) to simultaneously detect HIV-1 and HCV RNA with multiplex transcription-mediated amplification (mTMA) on pooled or single donations. HIV-1 and/or HCV RNA discriminatory probes confirm infection and discriminate the virus type. When a multiplex reactive sample does not react in discriminatory assays, the result is considered nondiscriminated reactive (NDR) and the donor status is uncertain.