[Comparative study of six blood gas analysers]

An evaluation process directed by the biochemistry department of the UHC of Montpellier about acquisition of blood gas analysers for a point of care testing in 10 different medical care services. The values obtained by the different measurement machines have been compared taking into account the intra and inter measures variabilities. In this work, the results of 4 machines tested: Rapid-point 405, GEM Premier 3000, i-STAT 1 (série 300) and ABL 77 are compared with one i-STAT (série 200) and one OMNI S already available in the laboratory. The study lasted one month (november 2004). Each week, the two machines of the laboratory was compared with a new analyser randomly chosen between the four machines tested. In this study, including 21000 values, the statistical tests have been applied under the hypothesis that none of the measurement machine could be a "gold standard". Beside the classical research of correlation between the different values, we added the research of concordance between machines and the application of imperfect gold standard method. A high level of statistic concordance was observed between the different analysers. So the equipment has been selected using biological, analytic and computing criteria.