Evaluation of the Mindray BC-6800 Complete Blood Counts Analyzer

Abstract

This article is available from http://www.labmedonline.org 2013, Laboratory Medicine Online This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Background: The BC-6800 (Mindray, China) is a recently developed hematology analyzer that utilizes ‘SF Cube Technology’ to improve the reliability of complete blood counts (CBC), white blood cell (WBC) differentials, and erythroblast counts. In this study, we evaluated the performance of the BC-6800 for CBC, WBC differentials, reticulocyte counts, and erythroblast counts and analyzed the efficiency of its flag system. Methods: Specimens from 100 healthy controls and 95 patients were used. We performed precision and correlation studies of CBC, WBC differentials, reticulocyte counts, and erythroblast counts. We also analyzed the efficiency of the flag system in detecting abnormal blood cells. Results: The coefficients of variation (CVs) of precision were 0.9800 for CBC except erythrocyte indices, and >0.9500 for WBC differentials except monocyte and basophil. The WBC differentials and erythroblast counts obtained using the BC-6800 were well correlated with those of manual counts. The efficiencies of the flag system were 77.9% for Blasts, 82.1% for Immature Gran, 86.3% for Atypical Lymph, and 92.6% for NRBC present. Conclusions: The BC-6800 showed good precision and correlation with pre-existing hematology analyzers. The flag systems were quite efficient for detecting abnormal blood cells. Our study demonstrated that the BC-6800 hematology analyzer exhibits suitable performance and is helpful in routine laboratories.