An Automated Medical Device for Ultimate ABO Compatibility Test at the Patient's Bedside Towards the Automation of Point-of-care Transfusion Safety

In blood transfusion, accidents still occur because of ABO mismatch between donor and patient's blood. These errors, sometimes lethal, are principally due to wrong identification of patient and/or blood product or to human errors. The best way to avoid these errors is to perform an ultimate ABO compatibility test at the patient's bedside immediately prior to transfusion. Ideally, this test should be performed automatically, without human interpretation and with minimum blood exposure for nurses. This ideal and ultimate method is not yet employed because of the lack of suitable device. In this paper, we propose a system that may fulfil the above mentioned requirements. It is based on selective blood capture on biochip surfaces in a device which automatically drives the different fluids, performs optical detection of captured red cells and finally interprets the optical reading in terms of ABO compatibility. So far, our device achieved blood compatibility test with 99.3 % sensitivity and 97.9 % specificity.