Calculating Veterinary Clinical Pathology Reference Intervals for Research at the Integrated Research Facility, NIAID: A Practical Application of Data Partitioning and Statistical Methodology

The veterinary research community requires statistically robust reference intervals in which to contextualize the results of laboratory tests obtained in research studies. While published reference intervals are available for veterinary clinical practice, they typically do not account for differences in animal husbandry, variations in analytical equipment, and the diverse range of species encountered in a research setting. In addition, existing guidelines for statistical calculation of reference intervals do not address commonly encountered issues with data quality, sample size, research-induced population biases, and other impediments. In this manuscript, we document our pipeline to extract, partition, analyze, and statistically summarize in-house clinical pathology data for developing useful reference intervals to support research at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and showcase a practical application of statistical methodology that can guide other facilities in their own determination of clinical pathology reference intervals.