UC Anatomy Department Achieves Accurate Tracking and Rapid Inventory of Cadaver, Human Organ Labeling
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The vast majority of university teaching and research programs rely on public funding support, however these support is not always in the form of cash. For example, the Department of Anatomy at the University of California receives about 1,000 donated cadavers each year to support education in the health professions and future scientific research. To simplify and improve the cadaver tracking process, the Department of Anatomy is currently testing an RFID system provided by the Wireless Internet for Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC).
Lab staff use stick reader to read RFID tags
An increasing number of hospitals and research centers are using RFID to improve the tracking of cadavers and human specimens such as tissue samples, an application that originated with a system developed by VeriTrace to track the lives of those who died in Hurricane Katrina. remains. In 2008, Mayo Clinic began using RFID to track biopsy samples. More recently, the University of Michigan Health System has also begun using RFID to track human tissue.
UCLA’s anatomy lab is currently evaluating the WINMEC protocol, SpecimenTrak, said Brandi Schmitt, chair of the UC Department of Anatomy. UCKA also has labs at UC campuses in Davis, Irvine, San Francisco and San Diego. All four labs currently use a paper recording system to track bodies.
The RFID hardware has been in operation for more than a year and works well, Schmitt explained, and the company is now working on software integration to integrate the system into other labs. “Our main work at the moment is to integrate WINMEC software into the existing database. Our existing database that manages most of the data is separate from the SpecimenTrak database, so we had to develop an interface between the two.” Once this step is complete—Schmitt expects this fall—several other dissection labs will adopt the system.
When the bodies arrived at UCLA, each body was assigned an identification code, which was entered into the software and corresponded to the ID code of an RFID tag, which was then sewn into the body.
If the corpse is decomposed, then each piece is assigned an additional label, such as a limb or organ. The ID codes of these newly added tags correspond to the tags of the whole body in the software, and this non-serialized ID represents the type of specimen. The new labels are either sewn directly into movable body parts or permanently affixed to containers that store organs.
The working environment of an anatomy lab presents a challenge for encoding and reading tags. The vast majority of workbenches and storage areas in laboratories are made of metal, which reflects RF waves easily. Also, because the body and sample are mostly water, the liquid absorbs the RF signal, which affects the reading of the tag.
WINMEC and Schmitt tested several different types of passive RFID tags, including EPC Gen 2 compliant UHF passive RFID tags. Due to interference from metals and liquids, the read rates of these tags were not high, so the company decided to use low-frequency passive tags that comply with ISO 11784 and 11785. Lab workers use a stick-type RFID reader to read the tags.
Due to the low price of labels, in order to avoid system errors that may be caused by repeated use, when the samples (whole corpses or parts) that have reached the expiration date are discarded by Brahma, the labels are not recovered and reused, but remain on the samples.
Today, the RFID system supports the two main workflows of the UCLA experiment: the system is used to identify donated cadavers and to take stock of cadavers. In the past, labs used handwritten tags to identify dead bodies and manually read tags to perform counts, which was time-consuming. Now employees hand-held readers go through each body to collect data, which can be counted once a month, greatly reducing the time for counting.
Once the system is installed in the other four laboratories, the RFID tags can also track the movement of samples between laboratories.
Schmitt and WINMEC first discussed the possibility of using RFID to track dead bodies in 2005. After several tests of tags and readers, the project was officially launched in the second half of 2007.
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