Evaluation of automatic blood analyzer as screening method in fetomaternal hemorrhage

Abstract

Screening of fetomaternal hemorrhage (FMH) is essential in management of fetomaternal antigen incompatibilities of blood. The objective in this study was to evaluate the ability of automatic blood analyzer (ABA) to screen FMH, also comparing this method with flow cytometry (FCM). The contents of fetal red blood cells and fetal hemoglobin were evaluated by FCM and ABA, respectively, using both blood samples of male adults laced with umbilical cord blood diluted at 1/10, 1/100, 1/1,000, and 1/10,000, or blood from puerperal women collected within 48 hours following delivery. FCM had better performance (area under curve, AUC = 0.8723) than ABA (AUC = 0.6569) in detecting fetal blood laced with blood from male adults. At a critical level of 0.5%, ABA indicated that 27.5% of puerperal women would have FMH while FCM did not detect FMH. Our results showed that ABA overestimates FMH and disagrees with FCM on indicating puerperal women with FMH. ABA is inadequate for being used to screen for or to measure FMH.