Luminex QC Reports and Flags

2024-03-28

Premium Feature — Available upon request with all Premium Editions of LabKey Server. Learn more or contact LabKey.

When guide sets are applied, runs whose values fall outside expected ranges are automatically QC flagged. You can see these flags in the grid at the bottom of the Levey-Jennings page. This walkthrough uses the Luminex Tutorial Level II results. You can also see flags in the interactive example

View QC Flags

  • From the Runs grid, select View QC Report > View Levey-Jennings Reports and click Standard1.
  • Select ENV2, IgA, and Biotin as the Antigen, Isotype, and Conjugate respectively. Click Apply.
  • Look at the Standard1 Tracking Data grid below the plots.
  • Observe red highlighting applied to values in the Four Parameter Curve Fit EC50, HighMFI, and Trapezoidal Curve Fit AUC columns. View the plot for each metric to see the points which lie outside the guide set ranges.
  • Observe how QC flags have been added for each metric showing out-of-range values for each run.

Note that the QC flags are specific to the combination of antigen, isotype and conjugate parameters you selected.

Deactivate QC Flags

It is possible to deactivate a single QC flag, in this case we will disable the flag for EC50 - 4PL for the tenth run. When you deactivate a flag manually in this manner, it is good practice to add an explanatory comment.

  • Click on the QC flags (AUC, EC50-4) for the run that begins with "10".
  • You now see the Run QC Flags popup.
  • In the Enabled column, uncheck the box for the EC50-4 flag. This deactivates, but does not delete, the associated QC flag for this data. Notice the red triangle in the corner indicating a change has been made.
  • Click the Comment region for that row and type "Manually disabled."
  • Click Save in the popup.
  • In the Standard1 Tracking Data grid, notice two changes indicating the deactivated flag:
    • In the QC Flag column for run 10, the EC50-4 QC flag now has a line through it.
    • In the EC50 4pl column for run 10, the value is no longer highlighted in red.
    • You can see this in the interactive example.

Disable QC Flagging for a Metric

If your run-based guide set does not have enough valid data for a given metric to usefully flag other runs, you might choose to disable all QC flagging based on that metric. In an extreme example, if only one run in the guide set had a valid EC50-4PL value, then the standard deviation would be zero and all other runs would be flagged, which isn't helpful in assessing trends.

  • Select View QC Report > View guide sets, then click the Details link for the guide set you want to edit. In this tutorial, the only run-based guide set is the one we created for Lot 437.
  • The Num Runs column lists the number of runs in the guide set which have valid data for the given metric. In this example all three runs contain valid data for all metrics.
  • To disable QC flagging for one or more metrics, uncheck Use for QC boxes.
  • Click Save.

There is also a details button on the active guide set in the Levey-Jennings plot UI giving you quick access to its parameters. Only the most recently defined guide set is editable.

Disabling QC flagging is an exception, as long as the guide set has been applied to other runs before defining a new guide set, you can return later to enable or disable flagging as needed.

View QC Flags in the QC Report

The same red highlighting appears in the QC Reports available for the entire assay and for each individual run. When you view the QC report for the entire assay, you see red highlighting for all out-of-range values detected using guide sets, not just the ones for a particular analyte (as in the steps above). Red highlighting does not appear for any value whose QC flag has been manually deactivated.

Here, we view the QC report for the entire assay, then filter down to see the results matching the selections we made above.

  • Click View QC Report > View titration qc report.
  • Observe a grid that looks like this one in the interactive example.
  • Filter the grid so you see only the rows associated with the same analyte/isotype/conjugate combination that was associated with guide sets in earlier steps. Our example data only has one isotype and conjugate, so further filtering to those selections is unnecessary here:
    • Click the Analyte column header.
    • Choose Filter.
    • Select ENV2.
    • Click OK.
  • You can now see the same subset of data with the same red highlighting you saw on the Levey-Jennings page.

Related Topics