Evaluation of the Beckman Coulter UniCel DxH 800, Beckman Coulter LH 780, and Abbott Diagnostics Cell-Dyn Sapphire hematology analyzers on adult specimens in a tertiary care hospital.

We evaluated the new Beckman Coulter DxH 800 hematology analyzer (Beckman Coulter, Miami, FL) vs the Abbott Diagnostics Cell-Dyn Sapphire (Abbott Diagnostics, Santa Clara, CA) and Beckman Coulter LH 780 hematology analyzers using 430 adult specimens. The DxH 800 provided a CBC and differential that correlated well with those of the Sapphire and LH 780, with most parameters showing correlation coefficients (r) of more than 0.97. In the instrument vs 400-cell manual differential comparison, all 3 instruments showed similar and acceptable accuracy to the reference method except for nucleated RBC (NRBC) enumeration, in which the DxH 800 and Sapphire outperformed the LH 780. We also compared clinical efficiency by determining whether flagged specimens showed abnormalities on a peripheral blood smear as defined by International Council for Standardization in Haematology criteria. The efficiency, sensitivity, and specificity of the DxH 800 were 77.0%, 87.1%, and 73.0%, respectively, compared with the Sapphire at 75.8%, 93.5%, and 68.8%, respectively, and LH 780 at 66.1%, 93.5%, and 55.3%, respectively.