On Roche m 511 analyzer, ‘everything is done from the slide’

November 2018—Roche Diagnostics will soon launch its m 511 analyzer for hematology laboratories. Krista Curcio, Roche technical marketing manager, hematology, told us, in a recent conversation with CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle, how and why the new instrument is different. “We’re turning it upside down and going a different way,” she said of the m 511. Here is more on the instrument Roche will launch before year’s end.

Roche has a different technology and it has a good pedigree in terms of image analysis and image recognition. Please outline the new Roche hematology technology and offering.

When I’m talking to our potential customers or other medical technologists and technicians about it, the first thing I say is forget everything you know about how we’ve always done hematology because it’s totally different. There’s no impedance, no flow cytometry, no light scatter, all the things we’ve been so accustomed to in hematology for 40-plus years. We’re turning it upside down and going a different way because everything is done from the slide. Think about that from a med tech perspective: When you run something on an analyzer, whenever we have questions about what the analyzer is telling us, we make a slide and put it under the scope. So I like to tell people we’re using sort of a reference method. If you go back to the place we always go when we have questions, it is the slide, and that’s where we’re getting all our information.

Describe how it is that you, through the use of a slide and technology, are getting some of the answers we’re used to getting from the traditional instruments in hematology.
The m 511 uses a technology called digital multispectral image analysis. It’s using different wavelengths of light—red, blue, yellow, and green. By using those different light sources, it’s able to recognize the different characteristics of the cells. So the first step under a low magnification process is using those different light sources to identify and count your reds, whites, platelets, and any nucleated reds that are present.

Then switching to high magnification, it’s again using those light sources to differentiate the whites into their five normal types or into anything abnormal or unclassified. Using the blue light, which is specific for hemoglobin, we’re able to determine our MCH measurement based on how much light the individual RBCs are absorbing. And then using all five light sources we are able to determine MCV based on how much of the light the individual RBCs are absorbing. With those numbers—MCV and MCH—we can calculate the rest of the RBC indices.

All this perception and analysis of colors is driven by a computer, correct? It’s not visible to the naked eye.
Correct.

Apart from the technology as you roll this out—I realize it’s a new rollout in North America but it’s been in Europe for a while—how are customers reacting? What are the big concerns of customers in hematology departments? What are their desires? And how does this product help fulfill their needs?
Of course, people who want to provide the best information they can to their clinicians for the patient are always cautious when it’s something new. People want to see data to show that, yes, it really does work and we’re going to give you information that’s equivalent to what you’re accustomed to seeing from a traditional hematology system. People are excited about it also, once the idea of how it’s working clicks with them. Laboratorians are seeing the potential for this system and what it can do. Having the images available can provide a lot of benefit.

Because of our technology on the m 511, some types of challenging patient samples will be more easily analyzed in the laboratory, and technologists are excited about that possibility.