In CSF diagnostics, the nonlinear relationships of protein analytics do not allow simple manual evaluation and make it difficult to accept the mathematically correct interpretations. This can only be solved by appropriate software. The functional combination of all individual data of a patient into disease-typical interpretation patterns also depends on this.
Current practice
The integrating presentation of CSF data in a report with a quotient diagram is usually created using software linked to automatic analyzers. This cumulative findings report with online and offline data of a patient is communicated to the laboratory physician and neurologist for interpretation. Based on the disease-typical data patterns, differential diagnosis in neurology and psychiatry is thus supported. The project aims to develop a stand-alone solution for data interpretation on data patterns available to every practitioner.
This is all the more important as the international practice is still dominated by the uncoordinated listing of individual laboratory data without functional consolidation in the report to the requesting physician. This consolidation is thus left to the neurologist. This leads to the fact that sometimes not even CSF/serum quotients but only absolute values of the CSF proteins are compared with corresponding reference values, or those antibody determinations in the CSF are based on OD values instead of relative concentrations with antibody index.
Software available for every practitioner on his smartphone would allow a quick check of the raw data from the laboratory in an integrating report and to access an archive directly with examples and original literature for its interpretation.
This would be used by
- neurologists who need to communicate a diagnosis to the patient
- laboratory physicians, who should check an interlaboratory test result for plausibility and interpret it (especially interesting for international participants)
- students and beginners in neurology who can use the software as a learning program.