Monitoring of cleaning process
AssigneeEthicon, Inc.
InventorsSzu-Min Lin, Paul Jacobs, Jenn-Hann Wang, Robert Platt, Peter Zhu
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A method for monitoring a cleaning process for a medical instrument, includes the steps of placing the instrument in a cleaning chamber; placing a soil standard in the cleaning chamber; cleaning the instrument and the soil standard with a cleaning solution; and detecting whether soil remains on said soil standard. The soil standard includes two substantially parallel substrates separated with two substantially equal thickness spacers, wherein a gap is formed between the two substrates with soil in the gap.
Claims20
An apparatus for monitoring a cleaning process for a medical instrument, comprising:
- a cleaning chamber for receiving and cleaning the instrument with a cleaning liquid;
- a removable soil standard located in said cleaning chamber, said soil standard comprising:
- two substantially parallel substrates separated with two substantially equal thickness spacers, wherein a gap is formed between said two substrates;
- a soil in said gap;
- and
- at least one holder to secure said two substrates and said two feelers together;
- a soil detector coupled to the cleaning chamber and adapted to provide an indication of the amount of the soil on the soil standard.
8 An apparatus according to claim 1 wherein said soil is selected from the group consisting of organic soil, inorganic soil, and mixtures thereof.
A method for monitoring a cleaning process for a medical instrument, comprising the steps of:
- placing the instrument into a cleaning chamber;
- placing a soil standard in said cleaning chamber, said soil standard comprising:
- two substantially parallel substrates separated with two substantially equal thickness spacers, wherein a gap is formed between said two substrates;
- a soil in said gap;
- and
- at least one holder to secure said two substrates and said two spacers together;
- cleaning said instrument and said soil standard with a cleaning solution;
- and
- detecting the soil remains on said soil standard.
19 A method according to claim 18 and further comprising the step of comparing the light intensity received by the detector to a pre-determined value.
A method according to claim 19 wherein the instrument is cleaned when the light intensity received by the detector is the same or higher than the pre-determined value.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.