A free e-book for residents in Laboratory Medicine and senior medical students:

The Logic of Laboratory Medicine

Second Edition

Dennis A. Noe, MD

The effective use of laboratory study results depends upon a working knowledge of probabilistic decision-making and on a thorough understanding of how the entities measured in the laboratory relate to the physiologic processes of interest to the clinician. This book presents a comprehensive discussion on these topics, thereby providing a logical framework for the use of laboratory studies in medical practice.

This book is the Second Edition of The Logic of Laboratory Medicine. The First Edition was published in 1985 by Urban & Schwarzenberg and a revised version of the material was published as the introductory chapters in Laboratory Medicine: The Selection and Interpretation of Clinical Laboratory Studies, published by Williams & Wilkins in 1993. I have decided to publish this edition as an e-book so that I do not have to revise the book in its entirety prior to updating it. Instead, I plan to revise the book chapter by chapter over time and to make each revised chapter available as soon as its revision is complete. I welcome comments, corrections, and suggestions. Positive feedback will provide the inspiration for future work on this project.

Please contact me at dennisanoe@rcn.com.

The book is free. It can be downloaded in its entirety as a zip file (created with Winzip 8.0) which contains all of the chapters as pdf files (created with Acrobat 5.0) or the pdf files can be downloaded individually.

(2832 kB) Entire Book

(201 kB) Laboratory-based Medical Practice

(542 kB) Laboratory Methods

(281 kB) Diagnostic and Prognostic Classification

(201 kB) Evaluating Classification Studies

(136 kB) Monitoring

(597 kB) Biologic Variability

(195 kB) Organ Function

(143 kB) Nutritional Status

(194 kB) Tissue Injury

(183 kB) Genetic Disease

(502 kB) Cancer