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Next UK NEQAS year will start with run beginning of May

April 2017 | In May United Kingdom National External Quality Assessment Service (UK NEQAS) will start next four runs for inter-laboratory quality control in reproductive science of periode 2017 - 2018.

Each laboratory has at least one basic licence for UK NEQAS External Quality Assessment (EQA) and optionally for the staff additional individual licences for Internal Quality Assessment (IQA).

Each of the four assessments will be made within a time period of 4 weeks. After that, the correct answers will be published.

With the so called supervisor function the basic licence holder gets an overview of status and result from all participants of their laboratory.
  What's new?
UK NEQAS will introduce new early cleavage and blastocyst grading scheme. ACE and NEQAS have agreed that all embryos should be graded in a stage-specific way. This approach further aligns the grading with the ALPHA/ESHRE recommendations of 2011.
Here you will find more information.

The time-lapse annotation pilot which has started in 2016 will be continued. This pilot is dedicated for laboratories which routinely use time-lapse technology for clinical treatment. This part of the scheme will not affect UK NEQAS performance monitoring and will not be included in UKAS accreditation process for ISO 17043.
  This service will be carried out by the Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust on behalf of United Kingdom National External Quality Assessment Service (UK NEQAS).

The UK NEQAS  Reproductive Science Scheme, which consists of 4 distributions per annum, offers 2 assessment schemes: Embryology and Andrology.

Next distributions which will start in May, August and November 2017 and in February 2018 are open to new subscribers.


Here you can find the registration form, the embryologie flyer, the andrologie flyer and the participants' handbook.

For more information and registration, please contact repscience@ukneqas.org.uk.
 
The embryology scheme includes time-lapse videos captured from the EmbryoscopeTM incubator and rolling images from Cronus 3TM for early cleaving to blastocyst stage embryo grading.  
  8 Videos will be displayed for assessment of blastomere and embryo features.

The correct answers are blue highligted. The grey ticks show the answers of the participant.
  In another 8 videos the features of blastocyst and embryo will be enquired.

Also here, the correct answers are blue highlighted and the grey ticks show the participants' answers.

In Andrology scheme sperm morphology and sperm motility has to be assessed.    
  For morphology assessment, in 6 to 8 images will be shown pictures of 24 prepared sperms.

Each sperm can be clicked and assessed.

Also here, the blue highlighted features are the correct answers and the grey ticks show the participants' inputs.
  For motility assessment, 4 videos with moving sperms will be displayed.

Each video of about 2 min length shows samples in 5 to 6 fields.

Per video has to be assessed the motility of at least 200 sperms over all fields.

 
    In the first part of the assessment report are both the results of the current distribution and the summarize of previous assessments.

The Match provides the percentage of correct answers.

The Grade shows how good is the participant compared with the whole group.
 

In the second part  the development over previous distributions will be plotted.

The blue curve shows the performance of the participant, the geen and red curves the performance of the group.

Above the green curve are the best 25% of the group (top performers).

Below the red curve are the worse 25% of the group (low performers).


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