General Information

I am looking into the GLOCYTE automated analyzer for CSF counts. I am wondering if anyone out there has one and what their thoughts are on the instrument. It is pretty new and I would like to know if those using it have had any issues and if they're happy with their purchase. Thanks in advance for your input.

Hi, We often receive unstained peripheral blood and marrow smears from other cities in the country. These smears do not stain optimally at our facility, even after manipulating stain timings. Therefore reporting these is problematic. We suspect that folks out there fix the unstained slides in alcohol before sending them to us. Is there any solution for improving the staining??

Good Morning, Has anyone looked into this product? We're an outpatient organization with several medium-sized clinics and small school based health centers, doing non-waived testing at 3 sites (3-part diff CBCs only). We're considering this for one of our lower volume sites where the expected utilization won't justify the added regulatory overhead of upgrading our CLIA certificate. Interested to see if anyone has decided to use this yet, and what restrictions they put on its use in-house. The FDA press release states as part of its Intended Use that it is not for patients under 2 yrs of age (easy to follow), and that it is not intended "to diagnose or monitor patie…

Hi, Is it OK if the LJ chart graph lies on mean consistently (ie without fluctuations) ? Regards

Currently we are running our coag q.c. every 6 hours to ensure that we are not late. This is quite wasteful and we would like to run q.c. every 8 hours (as required). Any ideas on how to make sure q.c. is not getting run too late (after the 15 minute window). We use the ACL TOP 350's and I thought there was a way to hold results if q.c. had not been run but apparently I was mistaken. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Hi, Posting after a long time. Hope all of you are fine. My problem is this: We have bought Sodium Metabisulphite form Merck company, previousl;y we were buying it from some other company (I am forgetting the name). With this new reagent, even patients with more than 50% hemoglobin - S on HPLC don't have a positive slide sickling test or the sickling disappears gradually over the day. Can anybody help me with this???

I've been performing open vs closed comparisons on our Sysmex for a couple years but had the expected limits wrong. I was using instrument vs instrument numbers but actually found the correct data accidently searching for something else. My question is: Does each individual sample comparison have to meet Sysmex claims or is it on average. I couldn't get a straight answer from sysmex at all in fact they claimed that no one was doing that and that if we were testing controls on both modes then it was all we needed to do. I finally talked to someone that told me that the average was ok and that I should always use a normal sample for this but they could not provide any…

At our laboratory we use the Sysmex XN-10 (part of the 9000). The stated linearity for platelets is 2-5000x10E3/uL. We generally buy from CAP for linearity/calibration verification material. I noticed that CAP and Streck only went up to about 2000. How do you validate your analyzer to the stated 5000 or have you changed your AMR? Thanks!

Just gathering information...... Do you perform RBC counts on all fluids (not just CSF)? If so, what is your lower reportable range and what is the clinical significance?

I'm curious if anyone outs there have any specific procedures for troubleshooting ECMO patient's and their wonky Coag pictures? What tests do they typically use and what instrument do you run? Thanks

Dear all, I have got an interview question: I repeated a CBC and got two results of Hb 7.1 and Hb 6.9, which one should I report? Hb7.0 is our critical value which mean if below 7.0 we need to call the ward. Thanks so much! Regards, Yolanda

Hi everyone, We have recently been tasked with trying to standardize all our system's subsidiaries in terms of criteria to send peripheral slides back to a pathologist for review. The overall goal, of course, is to cut down on unnecessary slide reviews being sent back (normals, etc). Our subsidiary has historically used a very detailed set of guidelines (for example: not just any new anemic patient - but one with a hemoglobin of <6) with values within the rules to drive the criteria. Most of our sister subsidiaries are using a much more trimmed down set of criteria (for example: anemia, pancytopenia, etc.) without any values present. It is our lab's feeling th…

Hi everyone! I am reviewing old procedures and am looking for some references about QC on body fluid differentials. The Cell-Chex we use to QC the count package insert lists values for manual differentials, so it was put into the procedure, but I have found zero documentation that it even needs to be done. I have also reviewed numerous body fluid procedures and have yet to find another one that says QC on a manual differential has to be done. We don't do QC on CBC manual differentials, 'QCing' the slide just checks the stain quality (which is recorded every day anyway). Anyone have any input? Thanks!

I'm currently trying to pull together some Paed Coag ranges for basic investigations - PT / INR, APTT, Fib + TCT. I have done a literature search and have a number of hits, but I also wondered if any local unpublished data available (Have info from Great Ormond St, London). Once data collated, I would be happy to share with all contributors. Many thanks Alan Neal NZ

We are looking at replacing our CA-1500 with a Stago Compact Max. Does anybody out there have any experience with Stago? Opinions?

We do body fluids on the disposable hemocytometers. Then if our WBC count is greater than 10, we are required to do a cytospin and report out a differential. To make the cytospin we use one drop with albumin with several drops of specimen. Does anyone have any tips on how to make the best cytospin slides? My main complaint is that some of the slides I'm looking at have cells that are so compressed that I can't tell whether they are lymphs or segs. What about when the body fluid is so bloody?? How do I make a slide that isn't just over-crowded with RBC's? Any tips are greatly appreciated.

We have had a few patients that the doctor alerted us to that had a higher normal range platelet count on our LH500 that had also been tested at other labs and their results were lower, normal range. We did a study comparing our results to our main hospital lab's (we are a Cancer Center clinic) results to ours and their is a definite positive bias. Is anyone else seeing this? We also looked into the fact that we run our CBC's almost immediately after being drawn and the data comparing immediate results to 2hour post draw results didn't really confirm anything.

Currently our procedure for Cold Agglutinins is to put CBC tube in 37 degree heat block for 15 minutes and if that doesn't work to extend time for 15 more minutes. However there are times when this will not work if the titer is high on the Cold Agglutinin. I'm trying to find out what other facilities do in this situation. We have tried doing warm saline replacement, but currently our procedure for a saline replacement states that RBC count before replacement should match the RBC count after the replacement within 5%. This rule will not work with a Cold Agglutinin, so if you do a warm saline replacement how do you confirm you are putting out accurate results. Also wha…

Hi Everyone, This is a question for the Hematology experts out there. What is the clinical significance of someone that has chronic reactive absolute lymphocytosis with a normal WBC count? Do you think more testing to follow-up is required and if so what test(s)? I've done lots of research on this topic, but wanted to see what everyone's thoughts/ideas are regarding this topic.

Hi all, We are getting a new vesmatic ESR analyzer, for the verification of the trueness (accurate) in accordance to CLSI standard, must we compare results with the standard westergren method? or are we allowed to compare results with a verified vesmatic analyzer from other hospital , or to use EQAP materials? Thanks!! Yolanda

We currently perform post vas sperm presence and report our results as number of sperm seen per HPF and make a note if the sperm were motile or non motile. The American Urological Association states that a vasectomy is successful if less than 100,000 sperm/mL are seen. Does anyone have any idea how to convert sperm per HPF to sperm per mL? We could use a hemocytometer but numbers are usually so low that doesn't seem logical.

Does anyone one use Advia 2120 can tell me if [1] Manual open tube sampler, [2] manual closed tube sampler and [3] automated closed tube sampler (Autosampler) are using the same path after aspiration?? Do we have to do blood comparison (correlation) for different modes? Thanks so so much!!!

We currently use crystal violet in acetic acid to stain body fluid WBCs and lyse the RBS in a manual cell count. A new employee suggested we use New Methylene Blue as it stains the WBCs, but does not lyse the RBCs. Does anyone have experience with this? Thanks

We stain peripheral blood smears with May-Grunwald-Geimsa. But some smears do not properly maintain staining properties during long time maintaining. Especially after about two years, they loss basophilia of nucleus and we only see a hollow space in location of nucleus; however, cytoplasm maintain its staining characteristics for longer. Indeed, this occurrence does not happen for all slides. We also have slides stained more than ten years ago but despite it they have good staining characteristics

Is there a requirement to perform tachometer checks on a cytospin? The CFR's only state centrifuges and serofuges. Is it specifically required by CAP?