We won’t guess your CT window.

A CT window copied from somebody else’s instrument.

It starts helpfully: a colleague shares their validated panel, cutoffs and all, and the numbers come across with the names. But those cutoffs were validated on their machine, their chemistry, their extraction. A 36 that calls positive on their instrument may be noise on yours — and the report it produces looks exactly like a right one. Your QuantStudio 5 is not our QuantStudio 5, and it isn’t your colleague’s either.

Identity imports whole. Instrument truth arrives blank.

Name, type, disease caused, gram stain — the entry’s identity comes over as it stands. Instrument name, channel, lower CT, upper CT and load value are blanked on import; the first four become required on your copy before the panel can run, and the load value stays the lab’s call. Copying these across would look like an answer while being a guess about somebody else’s instrument — and a CT window guessed wrong is a wrong clinical result.

From published catalogue to bench copy.

• The admin publishes the reference catalogue — pathogens, channels, controls, AR genes — and you import the subset you run. Your lab’s list starts empty on purpose: a new lab hasn’t said which targets it runs, and inheriting a demo catalogue would answer on its behalf, wrongly.
• Target types at full weight: Bacteria, Fungi, AR Gene. AR genes carry their class — BlaNDM-1, class MBL.
• Channels wear the dye’s real emission colour — identical in both themes, because a dye’s colour is a fact about the dye, not a theme choice.
• Controls are first-class rows: PC, NC, NTC, Endogenous, Blank. The blank is a control, not a footnote.
• CT windows per target: lower and upper CT make the call, and named load tiers — 100K, 50K, 10K, 5K, editable — map to CT cutoffs and display as level, heat map, status or load.

Three names per pathogen, each right for its reader.

The working name your team says out loud. The PDF Name that prints on the patient report, resolved at print time, so a rename follows through onto reports you haven’t run yet. And Name in Result File — the string exactly as your instrument writes it, because one character out and the result simply isn’t recognised. An imported result finds its target by the name in the result file, so a pathogen without one can never be matched to anything. That is why it is one of the four required fields — while PDF Name is deliberately not required, since it falls back to the target’s own name, and requiring it would only ask for the same word twice.

Where it sits.

The instrument owns the chemistry; we own recognising its output. The LIS keeps the order and the instrument keeps the run — your panel copy is how PCR Lab Pro reads what the instrument writes, on your machine and nobody else’s.

Why this isn’t a LIS →

Import a panel. Answer the four fields.

Import your first panel from the catalogue and fill in the four fields the software refused to guess. Setting your CT cutoffs takes about a minute; the judgment behind the numbers stays yours. Your first released report is free and doesn’t need a card.