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A. PAPPAS, Spiral Biotech, Two Technology Way, Norwood, MA 02062 In the food and dairy industries, aerobic plate counts are determined by a time-consuming and laborious hand-counting method. The PetriScan, developed by Spiral Biotech, Inc. is an automated dry film colony counter that saves valuable time and labor, and improves efficiency in the microbiology laboratory. The PetriScan is designed for use with commercially available aerobic count dry rehydratable films such as 3M Petrifilm Aerobic Count Plates. The PetriScan captures up to four films using a flatbed scanner, counts colonies using grayscale analysis, reads barcodes, and records the results, all in less than one minute. The PetriScan’s data management capabilities include editing, saving, retrieving, and archiving. The system also includes a manual count function and an audit trail for tracking changes. Colony counts of food, dairy, and milk products plated on 3M Petrifilm can be directly compared by both automated and manuals counting methods. PetriScan was tested thoroughly through a series of comparisons between instrument and manual counts. The results demonstrate that the PetriScan Automated Colony Counter is a comparable and practical alternative to the standard method for manually counting Petrifilm, with a mean log difference between automated and manual counts for pooled data of 0.035. The data also suggests a strong linear relationship with a correlation coefficient of 0.98, a slope close to 1.00 and an intercept near 0.00. PetriFilm is a registered trademark of 3M Corporation. PetriScan is a registered trademark of Spiral Biotech
Session 69, NEW PRODUCTS & TECHNOLOGIES: Innovations in food safety
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