An Evaluation of the Performance of the Hycel Mark X Discretionary Multiphasic Analyzer

An evaluation of the performance of the Hycel Mark X “discretionary multiphasic analyzer” was undertaken, using as reference methods those routinely employed in the chemistry laboratory of a 400-bed community hospital. Day-to-day reproducibility studies for 20 days at several levels of concentration, patient comparisons, and recovery studies were performed on the following blood constituents: protein-bound iodine, total bilirubin, phosphorus, alkaline phosphatase, uric acid, cholesterol, total protein, globulin, urea nitrogen, and glucose. With few exceptions, the Mark X demonstrated good day-to-day precision, with satisfactory recovery studies. However, for several constituents the Mark X showed a considerable bias, generally giving significantly lower values than the reference methods. A similar significant bias was seen in the patient comparison studies. It was concluded that the Mark X in its present state has the capacity to perform well in day-to-day reproducibility, but that for several channels the mean values produced were significantly different from those produced by the reference methods.