The functionality control of horizontal agitators for blood bags

Abstract

Blood collection from donors and its next processing is an integral part of every hospital. The whole blood itself is only rarely used nowadays, except autologous transfusions, that's why every collected blood is separated into parts, usually red blood cells extract and plasma, eventually platelets. The platelets (thrombocytes) are stored in platelet agitators. The main function of the platelet agitator is to store platelet concentrates in continuous horizontal motion at a specified temperature. The reasons for this work were the requirements of the hospital to verify the functionality of their agitators. Some-times the blood bags were damage after the agitation. It means that there were some clutches of blood platelets. And this phenomenon has been seen more often in one of the agitator. We try to confirm or disprove if the functionality of this agitator is wrong. We compared the function of the agitators and we also made a several tests that were searching the effect of the surrounding events. © 2010 International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering.