Release notes Analysis 4.5 (July 2, 2021)

General

FastFinder Workflow 1.4 adds support for front-end order interfaces with LIMS systems. This will enable your laboratory to direct samples across your different workflows efficiently. Furthermore, workflows with varying PCR plate layouts can now be tracked by Workflow. FastFinder Analysis 4.5 and Lab management 1.5 bring automated quality control features that allow you to scale up QC across your assays. In addition, features are introduced to manage your analyses efficiently by assigning, labeling and discarding analyses. We’re bringing key laboratory metrics, team metrics & workflow metrics inside FastFinder. With this release, Insights will be available right where all your laboratory work happens.

As always, it is feedback from you that informs our roadmap, and allows us to keep improving FastFinder, so we want to thank you for your continued suggestions. Don’t hesitate to let us know how we can improve FastFinder even further.

For the specific release notes for Lab Management 1.5/WorkFlow1.4, see (link)

Analysis 4.5.2 (July 2, 2021)

New features

The quality control of your analyzed assays is now automatically evaluated during your analysis. Based on the configured Westgard rules, rule violations will automatically trigger error notifications, and visualize them in the Quality Control tab of an analysis. Levey-Jennings charts now visualize these checks and events accordingly. If evaluated, the control validity (visualized in the Summary tab) also takes the QC validity into account. If you’re interested in setting up automated QC, you can request QC activation here.

We also added support for analyses requiring color compensation for Roche’s LightCycler type I, II and Cobas z480; using the color compensation assigned in the Experiment tab of the LightCycler instrument software. With the addition of color compensation support, only files with the extension .ixo are supported; .xml exports are no longer supported. 

Efficiently manage your analyses from the Analysis overview or from within an analysis by:

• assigning analyses to yourself or your colleagues to manage the work
• discarding analyses that were wrongfully uploaded or analyzed, so that your list of open analyses stays clean
• labeling analyses to indicate that it is ready for secondary review 

Additionally, several tabs (Open, Authorized, Discarded and All) have been introduced to help you focus on your open analyses. For your convenience, it is now also possible to filter in the table and configure which columns are shown in the Analysis overview.

Improvements

• Automatic plate setup is available for Roche’s LightCycler type I, II and Cobas z480 when target names are defined per channel and per well in Sample Editor tab of LightCycler instrument software 
• Graph improvements:
• For amplification graphs, it is now possible to color the curves according to target
• an autoscale button is available for the selected curves or points
• When zooming in, the x-axis is fixed for amplification graphs
• Cq values can be visualized in the amplification graphs (see Graph settings icon)
• Plate improvements: the plate selection toolbox is extended to easily select rows, columns and quadrants on a plate 
• When sorting the notifications column in Summary and Details, ‘Errors’ now have a higher priority than ‘Marked for retest’

Fixed bugs

The following issues have been fixed in the Analysis 4.5 release:

• Resetting the scale of amplification graph settings does not take the x-axis into account
• Dropdown of filters disappears after using search box

Design improvements

• We made visual improvements of the graph/ plate, making things easier to find & more consistent with other elements on the results screens
• Section icons are now more distinct from dropdown icons, making sections more visually