Flow cytometric reticulocyte counting: a comparison between two methods

The peripheral reticulocyte count is commonly used as an indicator of the erythropoietic activity of the bone marrow. Manual counting provides results with a high degree of inaccuracy and imprecision. Automation of counting is therefore needed. The increase in the number of methods available requires however that the results from the various methods agree with one another. The aim of our study was to evaluate the analytic performance of two automated hematology analyzers by a parallel study. We compared the analyzers between them and with manual counting. We enrolled in our study a total of 100 healthy subjects and an additional 80 patients affected by various hematological diseases. Difference between methods is statistically significant: the reference intervals of ADVIA2120 are higher than the Sysmex XE-2100. The correlation between methods and correlation with the microscopic method are excellent and statistically significant. In conclusion, we can affirm that total automation of reticulocyte counts represents a definite improvement over microscopic counts. This study confirms the diversity of the reference intervals still exists in the new automated hematology analyzers.