Blood component fractionation: Manual versus automatic procedures

Over the last few years, quality system requirements have been introduced for blood components. The necessary compliance with standard productions will have a considerable impact on Blood Banks. The introduction of automated methods is the most satisfactory means to meet these requirements for blood component preparation. A new device has been developed to automate the fractionation of blood into components. We evaluated the efficacy of this instrument as compared to manual methods. A total of 218 units of blood have been collected, into several different commercial blood bag systems (77 into standard quadruple bag systems, 141 into bag systems with integrated in line filters), and used to evaluate the universality of the instrument. Whole blood units were processed using the Top/Top system and the Compomat G4 (Fresenius HemoCare). A separate program protocol was developed for each kind of bag. Use of the Compomat G4 resulted in a statistically significant (p<0.001) increase of the hemoglobin in filtered red cell concentrates (RCC) in comparison with the manual procedure, and a similar trend, even not statistically significant, has been observed for filtered RCC. Regardless of bag systems, we were able to observe a statistically significant increase of platelets in the platelet concentrates (PCs), when comparing automatic versus manual procedure. The automated procedure has been shown to be fast, and easy for the operators. This device reliably produces acceptable blood components, and has been shown adaptable to use with different blood bag systems. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.