ABOUT LAB IMPROVEMENTS

Lab Improvements is a Canadian company that designs and manufactures benchtop automation solutions for medical laboratories. Founded in Peterborough, Ontario by Alex Bushell and Steve Wright, the company grew out of a 2017 collaboration with Peterborough Regional Health Centre, where staff were spending up to six hours a day manually filing histology slides. That problem became the starting point for SlideTrack, and the same philosophy now runs through the whole product line.

At Lab Improvements, the future of lab automation is small, portable, and benchtop, not the lab automation systems built for large central labs. Those systems work well at scale, but they’re often too complicated and too costly for smaller and mid-sized labs to justify. Lab Improvements builds the opposite: solutions that are small in size but big on value, easy to implement in labs of any shape and size, and priced so that even smaller labs can make the case for automation.

Lioness Medtech is proud to bring this approach to laboratories across Sweden, as the regional distributor for the full Lab Improvements product line.

LABORATORY AUTOMATION FOR PATHOLOGY

• SlideTrack: a benchtop system that automates the sorting and filing of pathology and histology slides into long-term storage. An operator loads up to 200 slides at a time then walks away, allowing SlideTrack to process independently. Each slide is scanned for barcodes, key characters, unique identifiers or even colours. This information is used to sort, divert or archive slides into long term storage magazines.
• BlockTrack: a benchtop system that automates the sorting and archiving of pathology blocks. An operator can load up to 50 pathology blocks at a time into a storage magazine before placing it into the device. Each block is scanned for barcodes, key characters, unique identifiers or even colour for fast, reliable retrieval.
• CapTrack: a benchtop system that automates the capping of 13mm specimen tubes. Staff are able to load the up to 40 samples at a time and then walk away while the CapTrack will securely place a plug style cap in each tube, reducing high-risk manual task tied to repetitive strain and bloodborne pathogen exposure.
• RackTrack: Software designed for tracking cytology vials and tubes (including ThinPrep and SurePath) into racks and trays, with retrieval logging and discard-control alerts to keep samples compliant without overfilling storage.
• Consumables: cardboard storage boxes for long-term slide and block archiving