blindspiker

The R package, blindspiker, was initially developed for the Internal Dosimetry program at the Savannah River Site, based on an R script, “SRS Blind Spikes-4.R”, written by Tom Labone.

The first step in using the package is to load your data. This is made easy **with the get_data ** function. This function reads in data directly from .csv files. See the help for get_data (?get_data) for the necessary columns.

To summarize the spike values provided to the laboratory,

table_spike summarizes all individual spike values and

spike_combos provides any combinations of spike values in individual samples that the user chooses to have tallied.

plot_run provides run charts with the option of plotting in analysis units or by a ratio of the laboratory results to the blind spike values. Both versions show uncertainty ranges of the results. Uncertainty bars are shown on the laboratory results and the ratios. When there is no overlap with the spike values, the laboratory result is either a false positive or a false negative. False positives are excluded from the ratio version when there is no spike value to avoid division by zero.

table_false provides confidence intervals on error rates for all laboratory results.

plot_tat plots the laboratory turnaround time for each spike sample.

plot_qq provides quantile-quantile plots of the results. Random errors are expected to fluctuate in a normally distributed pattern. When the QQ plot shows a deviation from normal, further investigation in the underlying process may be needed.