Automatic plate reading and colony counting system

Today pharmaceutical Quality Control laboratories have to process many plates coming from environmental monitoring.

The manual reading of the plates gives the following challenges to the lab :

• Human errors: Human error is the most common error and occurs during monotonous tasks like colony counting
• High cost and time for low value-added tasks
• Non homogenous results
• Data collection: pressure for traceability by regulation 

We are developing an automated plate reading system, to overcome the presented challenges by:

• reducing the mistakes due to human error in counting
• reducing labor costs
• saving time for lab technician for more valuable tasks
• increasing time to result with a rapid solution 
• ensuring full traceability and data integrity

Our solution offers two options:

• End point reading: the plates are loaded in the automatic reader after incubation time. An image is taken by the instrument and the result is given: presence/absence and then count.
• Kinetic reading: the plates are loaded in the system for incubation. A reading is performed every x hours in order to visualize the growth and give faster results in case of positives.

Both systems would be modular, so that a variable number of plates can be handled. A module has a capacity of at least 350 plates.