Yasuaki Kojima

High‐throughput pretreatment system in automated urinary sediment analyzer

BACKGROUND Urine contains microscopically observable particles that can indicate certain types of disease in the urinary tract system. Determining these various types of sediments by manual operation is a cumbersome and time-consuming task. To eliminate this labor, we developed an automated urinary sediment analyzer with high-throughput pretreatment system. METHODS The pretreatment system mainly consists of four reaction vessels for dying samples (urine), a sheath flow chamber, and an unique sample carrier mechanism from the reaction vessel to the flow chamber, which enables overlapped processing, and rapid transfer of samples with small dispersion and a short buildup time. RESULTS The buildup time was experimentally found to be 1.8 s, and the extra-sample volume beside that for measurement was only 4.9 microl (1/20 of the total sample volume). CONCLUSIONS Short buildup time results in high throughput of 120 samples per hour, and relatively small extra-volume contributes to reduce carryover.