Analysis of food and tissue samples for IAEA's Reference Asian Man Project (Phase 2): Quality assurance aspects

Abstract

Quality assurance (QA) procedures were established to generate reliableresults for a set of trace elements of radiological significance, namely Cs,Sr, Th and U. Special attention was given to design QA procedures by incorporatingboth internal and external analytical quality control (AQC) procedures, sincethe project involved a group of countries working on the same analytical problemunder different conditions. The procedures included (1) use of existing certifiedreference materials (CRMs) to validate analytical methods, (2) generatingreference values in selected CRMs where certified results were not available,(3) preparing a new total diet CRM, (4) adopting the concept of a CentralReference Laboratory (CRL) to harmonize QA efforts, and finally, (5) analysisof 10% of all samples in the project by both the CRL and participant laboratoriesto assess performance of the methods used.