The present invention relates to the field of medical lab equipment. In particular the present invention discloses a fully automated system for staining tissue specimens and cell preparations.
A normal function of medical laboratories is to examine cells and cell tissue under a microscope. The lack of contrast between individual cells and the background matrix or between individual parts of cells can make it difficult to examine cell and tissue preparations. To improve the contrast, researchers have applied stains to cell and tissue specimens to be examined. The stains are absorbed differently by the various structures in cells such that the contrast between the different cell structures is improved.
Staining tissue specimens is a nontrivial time consuming process. Often a number of different staining and rinsing stages are required. Each stage requires a specific amount of reagent or buffer and takes a specific amount of time. Thus, trained technicians are often employed to perform such operations. Furthermore, hospitals and laboratories must stain very large numbers of tissue specimens for patient diagnoses. Thus, automated tissue staining systems have been developed. By automating the process, expensive human labor is eliminated. Furthermore, automatically staining specimens significantly reduces the probability of an error occurring during the staining process.
To ensure that the proper staining procedures are followed, most automatic staining systems require that the user carefully enter the staining protocol and load the proper reagents. The complicated procedures require user training before such devices can be operated effectively. It would therefore be desirable to simplify the operation of an automatic tissue-staining device.
A method and apparatus for specimen slide preparation is disclosed. The method and apparatus of the present invention uses slide trays that have receptacles for at least one specimen slide and an associated reagent pack. The specimen slide and/or reagent pack includes an identifier that specifies a particular slide preparation protocol that should be followed. The method and apparatus reads the identifier to determine the particular slide preparation protocol and then prepares the specimen slide according to the particular slide preparation protocol. The apparatus may obtain some or all of the reagents needed for the particular slide preparation protocol from the reagent pack.