Evaluation and advantages of an automatic magnetic mixing of syringes integrated with a whole blood gas analyser

Background: Arterial blood gases are essential for the diagnostic and therapeutic management of severely ill patients. The pre-analytic phase is crucial to the quality and interpretation of the results. Whole blood specimens used for blood gas analysis must be thoroughly mixed prior to analysis. Producing a homogeneous sample is important to obtain accurate results. The availability of a new system able to automate the standardization of the sample mixing would be a way to improve this step. We evaluated the quality of automatic mixing with the use of SafePICO syringes and ABL 825 FLEX blood-gas analyser. Methods: Quantitative measurements of total hemoglobin and potassium were performed on ABL 825 FLEX from 216 whole blood specimens collected in SafePICO syringes and were compared with those obtained with LH 750 for hemoglobin and LX 20 for potassium. Results: Quantitative results showed excellent agreement with a reference analyser for the analytes with correlation coefficients greater than 0.97. No bias was observed for hemoglobin and the small difference observed for potassium is not clinically significant and was not due to hemolysis but to the differences between the methods. Conclusions: ABL 825 FLEX produces a homogeneous specimen which minimizes the pre-analytical errors manipulator dependent.