Innovation for reducing blood culture contamination: initial specimen diversion technique.

We hypothesized that diversion of the first milliliter of venipuncture blood-the initial specimen diversion technique (ISDT)-would eliminate incompletely sterilized fragments of skin from the culture specimen and significantly reduce our blood culture contamination rate (R). We studied our hypothesis prospectively beginning with our control culture (C) definition: one venipuncture with two sequentially obtained specimens, 10 ml each, the first specimen (M1) for aerobic and the second (M2) for anaerobic media. The test ISDT culture (D) was identical, with the exception that each was preceded by diverting a 1-ml sample (DS) from the same venipuncture.

Three- to six-year followup for 379 benign image-guided large-core needle biopsies of nonpalpable breast abnormalities.

Background: Determining the negative predictive value of benign large-core needle biopsy of nonpalpable mammographically detected breast abnormalities has been difficult because benign results generally preclude surgical excision. Longterm followup of these patients is important to ensure timely diagnosis of new abnormalities and to identify false negatives.

Study Design: This cohort study comprised 379 patients, all with benign diagnoses following imaging-guided large-core needle biopsy of nonpalpable mammographically detected abnormalities.