Applied biostatistics in laboratory medicine

von JLM | Juni 12, 2023 | Original Papers

As Associate Editors of J Lab Med, we were pleased to organize a special issue on “Applied Biostatistics in Laboratory Medicine” at the request of Editor-in-Chief Peter Schuff-Werner. This field is both old and new for the journal. On the one hand, biostatistical evaluation has been an established part of almost every publication in clinical chemistry and laboratory medicine. On the other hand, there are innovative research and development activities at the interface between medicine and statistics that go well beyond the scope of the usual statistical challenges.

Contents of the issue

If one wanted to classify the respective challenges according to their degree of innovation, one would probably have to form three groups: On the traditional side (A) would be tasks of daily laboratory routine such as quality control and method comparison, or simple hypothesis tests such as t-test or ANOVA (analysis of variance). Hand in hand with this statistical knowledge, young laboratory scientists in particular are increasingly gaining the digital competence to understand and to write relevant computer programs if necessary. In this context, it is worth mentioning that the “Young Laboratory” section of the DGKL (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Klinische Chemie und Laboratoriumsmedizin) has recently established a “Digital Competence” working group, which has made significant contributions to this issue.

At the transition between routine and research (B), we find standard statistical methods such as analysis and decomposition of distributions in direct and indirect reference interval determination [1] or zlog standardization of laboratory values for electronic health records [2].

At the most innovative end of the task scale (C) is undoubtedly the application of Big Data and Statistical Learning techniques [3, 4], for which laboratory medicine seems predestined simply because of its immense flood of data. In Germany alone, our conservative estimate suggests that about four million laboratory values are generated every day, which are stored in increasingly large electronic databases and made available for statistical analysis as part of local and national research and e-health initiatives.

We have attempted to highlight some of the current research areas in this special issue to give J Lab Med readers a broad impression of tasks that are at hand in the three areas mentioned above and to demonstrate some practical solutions currently being developed by representatives of our field. Our admittedly subjective selection includes six contributions [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10] (Table 1).