Evaluation of the Sysmex UF-100 Automated Urinalysis Analyzer (Hematology‪)‬

The microscopic analysis of urine sediment provides essential information to clinicians about disease states in patients. Unfortunately, it lacks precision and has wide interobserver variability [1- 4]. Moreover, it is a very labor-intensive procedure, adding greatly to the cost of providing laboratory services [5]. In the attempt to automate the process of microscopic urinalysis, image-based analysis systems have been developed [1, 3, 4, 6, 7]. However, even though these image-based automated systems offer increased speed of throughput and precision, there is still the need for an operator to visually inspect images of cells and casts as the sample is processed by the instrument; this severely limits their usefulness in terms of freeing technician time to perform other tasks within the laboratory. Therefore, the need for a truly walkaway microscopic urine analyzer is great. To this end, we evaluated the UF-100 (Sysmex Corp.) automated urine analyzer, a flow cytometer-based walkaway instrument that performs automated microscopic urinalysis. Materials and Methods