Abstract
The workload in our pathology laboratory is steadily increasing. To improve medical safety and reduce the burden of pathological technologists, we introduced an automated tissue-sectioning machine. From the start of its introduction, we had already been making efforts to improve our method of preparing paraffin blocks to maintain tissue section quality. Here, we report on the performance of the automated tissue-sectioning machine and evaluated the improvement of the quality of slide sections of different tissue types. A total of 43,488 paraffin blocks from surgical pathology specimens were prepared routinely from January 2017 to June 2018. Initially, the paraffin blocks were roughly trimmed and hard tissues were removed by pathological technologists. The paraffin blocks were then automatically cut into sections of 5 µm thickness, and the quality of slide sections of various tissues was evaluated. A total of 28,876 paraffin blocks were automatically sectioned, and 91.9% (26,541/28,876) were evaluated as high-quality slide sections. Slide sectioning of the ovary (97.4%) and uterus (95.5%) was particularly successful compared with other tissues, and the overall quality of the slide sections of various tissues was clearly improved compared with the quality at the time of introduction of the automated tissue-sectioning machine (p < 0.001)．In conclusion, high-quality sections were obtained from the automated tissue-sectioning machine, and this machine will be useful for reducing the burden of pathological technologists. Preparing paraffin blocks suitable for an automated tissue-sectioning machine is important to maintain the quality of slide sections.
