Use of a programmable desk-top calculator for the statistical quality control of radioimmunoassays

We have developed an interactive statistical quality-control system for the small- to medium-sized radioimmunoassay laboratory, which can be used in a programmable desk-top calculator instead of the medium- or large-scale computer systems usually required. The design of this quality-control system is modeled after the suggestions of Rodbard and has three components. The first component evaluates the relationship between the measured response variable of the radioimmunoassay and the precision (or variance) of these measurements. This derived relationship is then used in the second component of the system as the basis for the weighting function used to calculate an interative, weighted, least squares regression of the logit-log transformation of the dose-response curve. The third component uses the quality-control parameters statistically calculated from the linearized dose-response curve to monitor whether the assay is "in-control". The calculator tabulates the means and confidence limits for the various parameters and can plot the statistical quality-control charts. The major benefit of this statistical quality-control system is that it allows the real-time computation and plotting of quality-control data with a programmable desk-top calculator.