There are many differences.

ADCI is fully automated. Input are digital images - output are estimated dose with confidence intervals. Please view our 10 minute video available in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) for a brief demonstration of the software.

It is also fast, but gives accurate doses above 1 Gy. The online manual indicates the processing speed on a Intel I7 equipped laptop computer (view time required to process a variety of samples). This makes it possible to process batches of samples which would be necessary in a mass casualty event. We have developed a high performance computing version of the software, but it is not yet ready for commercial release.

Manual review and cell exclusion is still allowed, but is not necessary. Metasystems DCScore hasn't been updated since it was released in 2004 and requires manual review. It doesn't handle bent or twisted chromosomes as well as ADCI. Furthermore, it does not exclude overlapped chromosomes, which leads to inflated DC counts. ADCI separates touching chromosomes with the watershed algorithm and ignores overlapped chromosomes, unless they are so abundant in an images due to poor spreading, that the image is not selected by our automated methods (see F1000Research paper).

ADCI excludes and/or deprecates lower quality metaphase cells with the specific filtering methods described in our F1000Research paper. If too many images are excluded (<500 remain or fewer than 100 DCs), then our quality control system warns the technologist that the sample may fail to meet IAEA criteria.

The monocentric-dicentric SVM uses 16 different features (not only chromosome width) to distinguish between monocentric and dicentric chromosomes. We have an online tool for you to try your examples (you have to isolate the chromosomes that you want to examine).

Inversion is a display option that we added to ADCI for aesthetic preference. We think light chromosomes on a dark background are easier to discern. The images shown in examples are Giemsa stained.

Tricentrics are counted as dicentrics currently. ADCI does not count rings at this time.

Currently, they are not counted, because there are digital artifacts that cannot be easily discriminated from acentric fragments (see the supplement to the F1000Research paper).