In a hospital or a clinical laboratory, specimens such as blood and urine are analyzed for clinical examination, but the specimen from a patient is not always provided as it is for analysis and in most of the cases pretreatment for the analysis is applied to the specimen. The system that automates such pretreatment and analysis is a specimen processing system.
In recent years, the specimen examination has been diversified, and accordingly, a plurality of examinations such as hematologic examination, biochemical examination, and immunity examination is executed in the case of only performing the examination so-called blood examination. The above mentioned specimen processing system is developed so as to perform the plurality of examination items massively and automatically in a short time.
In a general specimen processing system, a bar code label is pasted on a specimen container containing a specimen collected from a patient, and the specimen container is fed to the specimen processing system from a rack supply unit, held in a box-shaped carrier called a rack.
Therefore, in the rack supply unit, the bar code label pasted on the specimen container is read and the specimen container is conveyed to each kind of processing unit that applies necessary pretreatment based on the information, thereby executing the pretreatment.
After that, the rack finished with the pretreatment for the specimen is conveyed to the most relevant analyzing device in accordance with individual examination items, and then the analysis is executed. An example of such a system is disclosed in PTL 1, for example.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds