18 June 2024 (Tuesday) - Mindray

There’s a new kid on the block. Back in the day every blood counter in the country was made by Coulter. And I mean *every* one.

Then Technicon launched the H1. With a five-part differential that (at the time) Coulter could not compete, it wasn’t long before Technicon made serious in-roads into the market.

Then along came Sysmex with faster smaller machines…

 

Mindray looks interesting. Particularly with their platelet de-aggregation capability. I doubt they will have their machines in at work before I retire, but maybe a year or two after…

13 May 2024 (Monday) - New Technology?

The nice people at Ortho turned up at work today, offered us all free food, and gave us a little talk about their latest blood grouping machine.

Personally I quite like the sound of their machine, but the reps are very good at making things sound good, aren’t they?

14 February 2018 (Wednesday) - XN Training

I had a morning’s training on the departmental new XN3000. It seems straightforward enough to use…

I can’t help but think back to the first departmental new analyser I ever experienced. The coulter S+4 which arrived at the Royal East Sussex Hospital in 1983 was *huge* and did a fraction of what the Sysmex XN does in a far longer time.

I wonder what they will think of next…

19 January 2018 (Friday) - Stain Comparison

I was asked to help with the evaluation of the new departmental automated slidemaker-stainer. I was to compare slides made on the old device with those made on the new one. Ideally there shouldn’t have been much difference.

There was. The new device gave much paler stain. I wondered why.

My first thought was the buffer. I got out the pH meter. Despite having followed the instructions in preparing the buffer, the stuff had a pH of 7.10. I made up fresh using measured amounts of buffer and water and got some with a pH of 6.83. that was better.

However the stain was still pale.

I looked at the stain times programmed into the devices. 

 

The new one had shorter staining times. That’s why it gives a paler result.

I can’t help but wonder why the two machines have different staining times though?

21 December 2017 (Thursday) - TOPS550 Training

Today I had some hands-on training in the use of the new TOPS550 coagulation analysers. In many ways they are similar to the old analysers. But as is so often the case, you start a bit of training thinking you’ve heard it all before and you learn little snippets.

Searching for results is now (for me) so much easier.

We also got to do some on-line questionnaires to prove we’d been listening. I got ninety per cent on both !!