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Detector wear

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AdeebR

Grand master

Posts: 169

Joined: Thu Mar 13, 2014 5:58 pm

Location: NYC

Post Fri Apr 15, 2016 1:09 am

Detector wear

Hi folks,

I'm curious to know the approximate rate at which your optimal detector voltage increases and consequently how long your detectors typically lasts. We recently had our detector replaced (for the first time since having our instrument installed), and saw our optimal DV jump from ~1300 with our old detector to ~2200 with the new one together with a nice boost in tuning and bead signal intensity. However, since then the DV has been steadily increasing quite quickly and in just over a month it is now up to -1600. This is a much bigger drift than we ever saw with our old detector and seems pretty unusual to me, but I was wondering what other people's experience has been.

Our instrument is admittedly quite heavily used, but not really any more so than with our old detector, and we also haven't noted particularly high background in any of our samples or anything that should be causing obvious damage to the detector.

Thanks,

Adeeb
Adeeb Rahman
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NYC
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mleipold

Guru

Posts: 5796

Joined: Fri Nov 01, 2013 5:30 pm

Location: Stanford HIMC, CA, USA

Post Fri Apr 15, 2016 3:37 pm

Re: Detector wear

Hi Adeeb,

In my experience, it varies significantly.

With our CyTOFv1 instruments, we were going through a detector roughly every 6 months. That was under pretty heavy use (average of at least 30hr/wk) and of samples with varying sample quality (some good, some high background, some contaminated).

Oddly, with our Helios instruments, our detector voltage is still quite high, even after 7-8 months of usage (installation around -2150V, both machines are still above -1950V). I can't explain it, but our data looks fine, and I'm not complaining about the detector lifetime!


One thing to keep in mind: we repeatedly saw a period of "burn-in" with new detectors on our CyTOFv1's. By this, I mean we would get it installed at -2100V or so, it would slowly decrease to -2000V or -1950V over a week or so, then have a period of rapid change, then stabilize at maybe -1800 or -1750, then go back to a slow fairly linear decrease after that.

Dropping from -2200 to -1600 seems like a rather big drop for "burn-in", though.


Mike

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