Quality control for fluorescence activated cell sorting in canine tumour immunophenotyping

Flow cytometry is a method which for a long time, has been used for the diagnoses of nonHodgkin lymphoma in human medicine. In the last decade, it has become a routine diagnostic tool for diagnosis of tumours of haematopoietic and lymphoid tissue origin in veterinary medicine. The aim of this paper was to demonstrate the validity of FACS for the diagnosis of canine lymphoma. Fifteen canine patients were included in this study with multicentric lymphoma. All dogs were staged and sub-staged. The immunophenotype of the patients was determined by FACS analysis and by immunhistochemistry (IHC). We compared IHC results with our FACS measurements. We also calculated averages, standard deviations and coefficients of variation of four different samples by labelling and measuring three parallels in different tubes. We performed a test of precision over time. Multiple samples were measured every 5 minutes, over a 25-minute period to measure how the results varied with time