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Every histologist has had some kind of adhesion slide mishap in the lab. Maybe you put a tissue on a slide and can’t keep it in place. Maybe you find a background stain on the slide as you’re working. Maybe some water gets trapped under the tissue and you can’t get a good scan when doing digital pathology. Whatever the case, you end up with a problem that means you have to start over—which will not make your colleagues happy.
“Nobody wants to have an unhappy pathologist,” said Rachel Finn, MBA, HTL (ASCP)CM, Product Marketing Specialist at StatLab. “Nobody wants to take that extra time to have to repair that slide or to recut and restain it.”
Not only does that scenario make the pathologist unhappy and the histologist frustrated, it also leads to that extra time coming at a literal high cost.
“The cost to rework a failed slide is estimated at $80 a slide when you factor in reagent costs, time, labor, and workload administration,” said Arielle Hobson, StatLab’s Product Manager. “That 25 cent slide could cost you $80 in rework, so it’s really costly and it’s really important to be able to do it well the first time to minimize those downstream costs.”
In order to help histotechnologists minimize those downstream costs, the two colleagues conducted a series of experiments that put different slides to the test during H&E, spectrophotometer, special stains, and IHC testing. Finn and Hobson, who released a white paper detailing this research, discussed their work in the NSH Assessing Adhesion Slide Performance Across Histology webinar.
Slides That Make the Grade
One area Hobson and Finn looked at in their research was the tissue adhesion performance of the brands they tested. During the experiments, each slide also was tested for its behavior with tissue samples of various difficulty levels. For example, tissues like appendix, kidney, spleen, and lymph were classified as easy, while medium samples included lung, foreskin, cervix, and placenta. The most difficult samples that the pair used in their testing were breast, skin, and fat tissues.
Slides were given scores of 1 to 5, with 1 slides causing severe loss or wash when used, rendering the sample undiagnosable, and 5 slides having no tissue loss or wash. According to the research, very few slide brands held up to the high standard that histotechnologists expect.
“The IHC tissue adhesion is where we really saw the shakeout. It was the true differentiator between adhesion slide brands,” said Hobson. “There are only a couple of adhesion slides that we tested that were able to successfully handle tough, tricky tissues with difficult antigen retrieval processes and maintain that tissue integrity really well.”
Finding the right slides can save a lot of time, money, and aggravation—making it a good idea to test the slides you work with based on your lab’s needs. To find out which slide brands performed best for tissue adhesion, as well as more characteristics Finn and Hobson looked for during their tests, watch the NSH Assessing Adhesion Slide Performance Across Histology webinar.
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