Digital morphology hematology analyzers are becoming more prevalent in laboratories Aims: investigate practices and assess the benefits and limits of digital automated microscopy in hematology.
Methods: questionnaire sent by e-mail in 2018 to French public and private laboratories.
Results: out of 118 responses (56 private, 62 public), 117 participants had a CellaVision® microscope, 1 had a West Medica®. Practices were sometimes different, especially in the choice of smears to be digitized or for quality controls (16.1% had internal quality controls, 48.3% external quality controls); 62.1% never used the red blood cell (RBC) characterization tool; the number of cells counted varied from 100 to 400. The study reported a high rate of agreement for these benefits: traceability (95.7%), staff training (94.1%), eye strain (91.4%), risk of error (87.2%), time saving (83.6%). Among the disadvantages, apart from the inadequate search for platelets clumps (93.2%), the agreement rates were often lower: adaptation to digital images (61.2%), difficult assessment of atypical morphologies (49.6%) or RBC morphology (49.6%).
Conclusion: despite well-established benefits, standardization of practices and technical improvement are still needed.
Keywords: automated microscopy; digital morphology; full blood count; hematology.