With AACC’s 2015 Annual Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo offering more than 400 educational sessions, it can be hard for attendees to choose which events to attend. To help those joining us in Atlanta make the best use of their time and catch the presentations of most interest, new this year are featured mini-tracks. The tracks organize Annual Meeting content in eight dynamic areas of laboratory medicine practice, including:
- Endocrinology
- Infectious Diseases
- Lab-Developed Tests (LDTs)
- Mass Spectrometry
- Molecular Diagnostics
- Personalized Medicine
- Point-of-Care
- Quality Assurance
The mini-tracks merely highlight Annual Meeting content in these eight areas; they do not require special or separate registration. Recommendation sessions within the tracks run the gamut from Symposia to Brown Bags.
Recognizing the key role clinical laboratory professionals play in the diagnostic assessment of endocrine disorders, the endocrinology mini-track covers topics such as the pros-and-cons of urine free cortisol testing in Cushing’s syndrome and the value of laboratory medicine to endocrinology practice.
The infectious diseases mini-track will cover some of the newer testing methods, such as molecular assays and fourth-generation HIV tests. It will also discuss lessons learned in the Ebola epidemic, early diagnosis of sepsis, and more.
Following the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) new guidance on LDTs, the LDT mini-track will discuss government oversight of companion diagnostics. Also, this track will go over the shift by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to a market-based reimbursement approach for laboratory services, a CMS update on CLIA’88 regulation of POCT, forthcoming changes in proficiency testing, and other CLIA changes. Validation of LDTs, laboratory-modified tests, and highly complex tests will also be a topic of conversation during this track.
The mass spectrometry mini-track will present recommendations for studies designed to establish the analytical and clinical performance of mass spectrometry based in vitro diagnostic tests to advance their adoption into routine clinical practice, and it will cover the overlap between clinical microbiology and clinical chemistry, among many other topics.
The molecular diagnostics mini-track reflects this fast-moving field, covering everything from the molecular biology of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and cervical cancer to to clinical applications of next generation sequencing for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and progression.
The personalized medicine mini-track will offer practical tips about the implementation and interpretation of circulating DNA tests and some of the latest developments, and it will discuss personalized reproductive medicine and more.
Point-of-care testing (POCT) is undergoing rapid technological innovation, and the POC mini-track will discuss opportunities for global convergence of POCT, as well as the accuracy of POC glucose meters, and how to optimize accuracy and precision of POCT in specific clinical settings.
The quality assurance mini-track will provide an overview of Individualized Quality Control Plans and how to validate new tests and meet quality standards, along with best practices in verifying and validating new methods.
Those who plan to attend AACC’s 2015 Annual Meeting and Clinical Lab Expo can use AACC’s online registration system, which enables attendees to create a personalized itinerary reflecting their particular interests and time requirements. Using this tool, you can choose your sessions by topic, program type, date and time, or speaker.