Laboratory Medicine

The Department of Laboratory Medicine of the Tenth Affiliated Hospital of Southern Medical University (Dongguan People's Hospital) is a large, highly automated and standardised comprehensive medical laboratory centre integrating clinical care, teaching and research, and is a Dongguan key clinical specialty. Upholding its motto of "seeking truth, seeking quality, seeking progress, seeking refinement", the centre is dedicated to meeting the diagnostic and treatment needs of patients and clinical departments, and wholeheartedly provides the highest-quality service for clinical care, teaching and research.

It has a total floor area of 4,000 square metres and operates 8 secondary laboratories: clinical laboratory testing, clinical biochemistry, clinical immunology, clinical microbiology, a molecular diagnostics centre, cytogenetics, a haematology laboratory and a clinical pharmacy laboratory. It has solid overall strength and attaches importance to building a tiered talent pipeline, and currently has 108 medical technical staff, including 1 person who is a professor, doctoral supervisor and postdoctoral co-supervisor, 3 Chief Technologists, 21 Associate Chief Technologists and 1 Associate Chief Physician; it also has 2 with doctoral-level graduate education and 13 with master's-level graduate education.

In 2013 it passed the qualification accreditation as a drug clinical trial institution. In 2015 it was approved as a standardised training base for laboratory physicians. It also hosts the Dongguan Laboratory Quality Control Centre. In 2016 it received support from the Dongguan key clinical specialty development hospital director's fund project. In 2017 the prenatal diagnosis laboratory attached to the Department of Laboratory Medicine passed on-site expert evaluation. In 2020 it became a surveillance unit of the national fungal disease surveillance network and was among the first Guangdong hands-on training bases for clinical amplification laboratories. In 2021 it obtained the status of Dongguan key clinical specialty. In 2023 it passed ISO 15189 accreditation by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS), and in 2025 it was approved for the Guangdong key clinical specialty construction project (Department of Laboratory Medicine).

It attaches importance to discipline development and closely integrates clinical work with research. Over the past 5 years it has led or participated in 21 research projects at or above the municipal/departmental level, including 4 funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, 6 provincial projects (including 2 provincial key projects) and 2 municipal major science and technology projects. It has published more than 80 academic papers, of which 59 were indexed in SCI, 3 appeared in journals of the Chinese Medical Association (Zhonghua) series and 4 in core journals. It has obtained 2 national invention patents.

It possesses advanced equipment including fully automated biochemistry-immunology assembly lines, a fully automated microbial mass spectrometry detection system, the BECKMAN NAVIOS fully automated flow cytometer and the Applied Biosystems 3500DX nucleic acid sequencer. It performs more than 500 types of laboratory tests, which can meet the diagnostic and treatment needs of all clinical specialties. Its main featured professional techniques include the following:

1. Clinical haematology and body-fluid testing: bone marrow cell morphology, immunophenotyping of malignant haematological diseases, CD34+ cell counting, lymphocyte immune analysis, human leukocyte antigen B27, cytokine testing and neonatal disease screening. 2. Clinical chemistry: specific proteins, drug concentrations and protein electrophoresis. 3. Clinical immunology: autoantibodies, Mycobacterium tuberculosis-specific cellular immune response and Down syndrome screening. 4. Clinical microbiology: rapid identification of bacteria by mass spectrometry, Aspergillus (GM) antigen testing and fungal D-glucan testing. 5. Clinical molecular biology: detection of alpha- and beta-thalassaemia genes, Y-chromosome microdeletion testing, the MTHFR gene related to clinically individualised medication, and prenatal diagnosis; it also provides sequencing services for research purposes. 6. Cytogenetics: culture and staining analysis of peripheral blood and bone marrow cells, routine chromosome banding (G-banding), and prenatal diagnosis (culture and staining analysis of amniotic fluid, chorionic villus and cord blood cells).