[Histonet] RE: Histonet Digest, Vol 97, Issue 5 Cassette Marking Slide labeling

[Steve McClain]

Leica sells the Surgipath brand cat. #3801880 a decent felt-type solvent resistant marker my techs like.
(still have and like hand written slides and techs initials).
Those black Tissue-Tek histo pencils are good too if you write tall, but for slides can carry some graphite dust onto the tissue sections..
High Quality Colored pencils stay on cassettes surprisingly well though alc-xyl, as our Jamaican friend  Dr. Jennifer Alexander and taught us this.

Looking to buy used RA Lamb  Microwriter may not be ethical in this forum, 
but expresses my admiration for those slow, but dependable workhorses.
We turn ours on and off maybe 4 times a year.
They'll even print 2D barcodes if you give them 25 seconds, 
but the BC do not read readily when covered by paraffin and we eventually removed the BC from cassettes.

Those Microwriters work for years on little maintenance- every 100,000-200,000 cassettes.
Permanent in Decal Acid KOH Xylene.
However, even those cassette labels can smudge if you heat and wipe the label area, e.g., when melting paraffin from the block edges prior to trimming in and sectioning. 
Anyone know of a good used Microwriter available, please let me know.

The slide/cassette-writers using UV curing ink worked well in our tests- barcode read well.
However, they depend on invisible UV light to work 
and failure to change bulbs could potentially lead to rookie-type disastrous non-labeling or washing off labels from cassettes.
Changing cassette brands/ bad ink/ bad bulbs may each cause a failure.
Telling 100-200 patients their specimens were effectively lost in processing because the cassette label dissolved away is not on my bucket list.

I almost missed bullous pemphigoid on a direct immunofluorescence case once because of premature UV bulb failure at ~80 hours-
this doctor failed to change the bulb in the UV scope.
It seems possible the same thing might happen with the flash bulbs type ink jet label curing.
I repeated the DIF (not surprisingly with same result)
And then took the slides to a different scope, and now I change UV microscope bulbs at 120-180 hours .
An LED UV source should be stable for years.

Several years ago we looked at laser etchers for blocks and slides and thought they had potential, yet seemed pricey for consumables.

Technical labeling and barcoding is a subject for another time.
Steve
631 361 4000
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