Comparison of fully automatic analyzer and manual measurement methods in sperm analysis and clinical affect

Aim: To investigate the clinical effect of the computer-aided sperm analyzers (CASA) by comparing the low sperm concentration semen samples evaluated by CASA with the sperm count performed on Makler Counting Chamber (MC) as a manual method. Methods: Semen samples were taken from184 patients coming to our clinic were evaluated with CASA (SQA-V Gold sperm analyzer, MES Medical Electronic Systems Ltd. Caesarea Industrial Park, IL 3088900, UK) and MC (Makler Counting Chamber, Sefi-Medical Instruments ltd., Haifa, Israel). Samples were divided into two groups as samples containing sperms and samples without sperms, according to the CASA results. Results: There was a very high correlation between the two measurement methods (rho = 0.982) and regression analysis formula was y=1.042x-0.104. No sperm was detected in CASA in any of the samples identified to have no sperm in MC. However, when patients who were identified with no sperm in their CASA measurements (n=51) were analyzed with MC, 29 patient samples (56.9%) had an average of 0.23±0.35 x106 /mL sperm. Conclusion: CASA's used in routine semen analysis provide a great convenience in measuring sperm count, compared to manual methods and provide highly correlated results. Manual verification of samples can be recommended since the samples diagnosed with azoospermia provided different results with a manual method in our study.