Evaluation and Performance Characteristics of the STA-R Coagulation Analyzer (Technical Briefs‪)‬

Recently, increasing coagulation test volume and tight personnel budgets have increased interest in automated coagulation analyzers (1). The first coagulation instrument, the Fibrometer (Becton Dickinson), used a moving electrode to detect the clot. This brought some degree of standardization to the reading of the clotting endpoint, but this method was labor-intensive. The next phase in instrumentation was semiautomation. These instruments had storage and delivery capabilities for reagents, but manual pipetting was required for the samples. Examples of semiautomated instruments include the Coag-A-Mate X-2 (General Diagnostics) (2) and early models of the MLA (Medical Laboratory Automation). The current generation of coagulation instrumentation is fully automated. Their capabilities include primary tube sampling, automatic rerun and dilution capabilities, and clotting, chromogenic, and immunologic methodologies (3). Examples of this type of instrumentation include the MDA (bioMerieux), STA-R (Diagnostica Stago), AMAX (Sigma Diagnostics), BCS (Dade Behring), and the Sysmex CA6000 (Dade International) (4). We summarize our technical evaluation of the STA-R. The evaluation addressed several issues, including ease of operation, methodologies available, reagent and patient sample on-board capabilities, ability to perform automatic dilutions, and validation of performance.