Evaluation of HemoCue white blood cell differential counter at a remote health centre in Australia’s Northern Territory

The HemoCue WBC DIFF system could be used for leucocyte and neutrophil counts but not for full differential counts

“…The study showed that there were good correlations between the HemoCue WBC DIFF system and the Cell Dyn Sapphire when analysing white blood cell and neutrophil cell counts. The biases between the two methods in this study were not considered as clinically significant, which was in agreement with other previous studies . The correlation between the two instruments with regard to lymphocyte counts was acceptable, but not as good as for white blood cell and neutrophils.…”

“…Osei‐Bimpong et al also found reproducibility for white blood cell counts lower than 5% when analysing samples with white blood cell counts >3.4 . The coefficient of variations for monocytes and eosinophils was higher than 10%, which is in agreement with previous findings . The clinical need for monocytes and eosinophils is limited in the paediatric emergency department.…”

“…The percentage of flagged samples with the HemoCue WBC DIFF instrument varied according to the literature. Russcher et al reported 15% flagged fingerstick samples while Spaeth et al only reported 2% flagged samples . The reason for the high proportion of flagged samples in our study could have been the use of fingerstick sampling.…”

“…The white blood cell and neutrophil counts fulfilled the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 criteria in most cases, while the lymphocyte counts showed bigger variations even if the average differences were small. The method correlations have previously been shown to be better when venous samples were run on both analysers than with fingerstick sampling , while comparisons between venous and fingerstick samples have been shown to be associated with clearly higher variations .…”

Evaluation of the performance of a point‐of‐care method for total and differential white blood cell count in clozapine users

“…These data are in agreement with Speath et al . The results for monocytes and basophils should be interpreted with caution because the numbers of these cells are normally low and this results in high variation, and this even accounts for automated laboratory analyzers .…”