definition artifact in labs
artifact. 1. any artificial product; a structure or appearance that is not natural, but is due to manipulation. 2. distortion or fuzziness of an image caused by manipulation, such as during compression of a digital file. film artifact artificial images on x-ray films due to storage, handling, or processing. phantom artifact artificial images seen with conventional tomography. standardization artifact an electrical stimulus of 1 mV deliberately introduced into the electrocardiogram so that pulse amplitudes on the tracing can be adjusted to 10 mm.