Consensus statement from the first RdRp Summit: advancing RNA virus discovery at scale across communities
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status: published
Clinical Guideline for Preimplantation Genetic Testing in Inherited Cardiac Diseases
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BACKGROUND: Preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) is a reproductive technology that selects embryos without (familial) genetic variants. PGT has been applied in inherited cardiac disease and is included in the latest American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology guidelines. However, guidelines selecting eligible couples who will have th...
Invasive Fungal Diseases in Adult Patients in Intensive Care Unit (FUNDICU): 2024 consensus definitions from ESGCIP, EFI...
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PURPOSE: The aim of this document was to develop standardized research definitions of invasive fungal diseases (IFD) in non-neutropenic, adult patients without classical host factors for IFD, admitted to intensive care units (ICUs). METHODS: After a systematic assessment of the diagnostic performance for IFD in the target population of already exis...
Clinical course of suspected familial and sporadic idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: Data from the PROOF-Next registry
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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Real-life data on suspected familial fibrosis, defined as the occurrence of the disease in a patient younger than 50 and/or having at least one relative affected by pulmonary fibrosis remain scarce. METHODS: The Belgian and Luxembourg IPF registry (PROOF-Next) is a multicentric prospective longitudinal and observational st...
APS calculator: a data-driven tool for setting outcome-based analytical performance specifications for measurement uncer...
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OBJECTIVES: According to ISO 15189:2022, analytical performance specifications (APS) should relate to intended clinical use and impact on patient care. Therefore, we aimed to develop a web application for laboratory professionals to calculate APS based on a simulation of the impact of measurement uncertainty (MU) on the outcome using the chosen dec...
Implementation of an ISO15189 accredited next-generation sequencing service with the fully automated Ion Torrent Genexus...
Published in Journal of clinical pathology
Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is integral to the delivery of personalised medicine for targeted cancer therapy. Average turnaround times (TAT) from reference laboratories with advanced expertise in sequencing are typically 2-3 weeks. Prolonged TAT for biomarker analysis can adversely affect patient outcomes. The project aim was to establish an a...
Successful demand management in diagnostic immunology testing.
Published in Journal of clinical pathology
We investigated whether we could have a material and sustained impact on immunology test ordering by primary care clinicians by building evidence-based and explanatory algorithms into test ordering software. A service evaluation revealed cases of over-requesting of antinuclear antibody, allergen-specific IgE and total IgE tests, and under-requestin...
Non-contrast short MRI surveillance for HCC screening: the study protocol of the SMS-HCC prospective multicenter study
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) comprises 75 to 85% of all primary liver cancers. Current guidelines recommend a biannual HCC surveillance using ultrasound (US) for high-risk patients. However, due to its low sensitivity for detection of early-stage HCC lesions, there is an urgency for more sensitive surveillance tools. Here, we describe the potenti...
Point-of-care testing for viral-associated pulmonary aspergillosis
INTRODUCTION: Over the last years, severe respiratory viral infections, particularly those caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the influenza virus, have emerged as risk factor for viral-associated pulmonary aspergillosis (VAPA) among critically ill patients. Delays in diagnosis of VAPA are associated with incr...
Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in children and adolescents-Clinicopathological findings
BACKGROUND: Barely two per million Belgian children/adolescents are diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) annually. In this retrospective study, we aimed to investigate the diagnostic features, clinical and laboratory characteristics, and treatment outcome of this rare entity. METHODS: Medical records of all pediatric CML patients (age ≤ 17...
