Laboratory Automation
Being innovative while cutting costs
      Several trends in laboratory medicine have affected the development and implementation of automation in lab analyzers during the past few years. Such trends are related to reducing costs, running tests with fewer lab personnel, and maintaining quick turnaround times for test results. IVD manufacturers have been responding to such trends in automation and instrumentation in different ways.   One such trend is automating the preanalytical sample preparation steps...
Automated plate streaking for better outcomes
          Doug Flammang is vice president, Culture Program Management for bioMérieux Inc. (Marcy l'Etoile, France). He is responsible for coordinating business and R&D activities for all culture-based microbiology products associated with the company. He can be reached at foodinfo@na.biomerieux.com. The streak-plate procedure is the classic method of isolating individual strains of bacteria from a sample. To perform this procedure, a lab worker...
Applying open source software to IVDs
  Carl Herrgesell is new product development practice manager at RTEmd (Pittsford, NY). He can be reached at carl.herrgesell@rtemd.com. According to Dion Cornett, vice president, North America sales at Red Hat (Raleigh, NC), “Today, the chief information officer (CIO) faces challenges that cannot be overcome by technical features alone: reduce costs, drive business innovation, enable competitive advantage, improve customer satisfaction, grow revenue. Every CIO faces a...
Efficiency through integration in developing IVD platforms
            Figure 1. This large-scale hemostasis analyzer is used in high-volume centralized testing laboratories. Such chronic conditions and common ailments as diabetes, heart disease, and strep throat require frequent monitoring or timely diagnosis. Today, more medical professionals around the world use large-scale IVD systems and small-scale point-of-care (POC) diagnostic platforms and instrumentation to obtain reliable results for common...
Optimizing automated liquid handlers
              IVD manufacturers and life science and clinical laboratories have benefited from the recent technological advances in liquid handling (e.g., handheld pipettes, automated liquid handlers). However, since automated liquid handling is a relatively new technology, standardized performance assessment and calibration guidelines do not currently exist. The consequences of poor performance due to liquid handling errors can be severe, such as...
Giving the labs what they want
          A number of trends in laboratory medicine directly affect the evolution of the clinical chemistry lab. All of these trends are connected to reducing costs and trying to get work done with fewer lab personnel, since lab technologists are becoming a rare resource and there is pressure to maintain quick results turnaround. The first effect of these trends is automating the preanalytical sample preparation steps of registering the samples in the laboratory...
Toward total laboratory automation
            As diagnostic possibilities expand with the advance of genomics and discovery of new disease markers, the burdens of central testing laboratories grow. Multivalent analyzers and the linking of instruments to an automation system can give labs a chance to provide the turnaround speed and throughput physicians and hospitals require. IVD companies are developing the necessary new analyzers. Some are developing the automation tracks larger labs...
Customizing software to prevent unnecessary bar code read failures
            Figure 1. Developing effective interface software allows the user to customize its bar code system to meet application needs.   Laboratory automation systems are ultimately only as accurate as the data they receive. For this reason, it is important to make the bar code identification system of a laboratory instrument as robust as possible in order to prevent misidentifications and avoidable failures to read (i.e., no-...
Optimizing the performance of precision fluid connections in analyzers
            As the tests performed with clinical analyzers become more specific and more sensitive, the requirements placed on the fluid-handling components and assemblies used in such analyzers become more stringent. More-accurate dispense volumes, low dead volume, reduced carryover, and minimal pressure drop are expected of the fluid path traveled by reagents and samples. These requirements can impose several design constraints on analyzers, including the use of...
The coming of age of microbiology lab automation
In today's competitive healthcare industry, automation is at the forefront when it comes to streamlining operations and advancing patient care. Automation has also gained a foothold in the laboratory, generating significant gains in productivity and changing many outdated operations. However, these gains did not come easily or without opposition. Even as analyzers began to infiltrate laboratory processes and preanalytics and as line systems hit the market, many people thought their use would be...