Hematology

December 2023—The recent CAP proficiency testing questionnaire was meant to be the coup de grâce. Hematology PT participants were asked about their band neutrophil reporting practices and, given that these manually generated counts were supposedly on their way out decades ago, the authors of the survey questionnaire expected to see very little activity. The survey, they hoped, would be a way to pound the final, data-driven nail in the coffin. Or, as lead author Maria (Ria) Vergara-Lluri, MD, puts it, “We thought this had all been laid to rest 30 years ago.” It wasn’t. Says Dr. Vergara-Lluri: “Surprise: 86 percent of labs that participated still report bands.” The results of the survey upended many of the assumptions, if not hopes, the authors might have had. Among laboratories that reported manual differentials, they found that most reported bands (4,554 of 5,268). Moreover, only 73 percent reported band reference ranges. On the morphologic challenge, bands classified as “easy” were indeed easy—participants classified them well.

October 2023—Hematology analyzers and the related workflow, expertise, efficiency, and IT matters were the topic of a roundtable when CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle met online Aug. 29 with two pathologists and representatives from Horiba, Siemens, Sysmex, CellaVision, Sight, and Abbott. Their conversation follows.
Fernando Chaves, what are the advances in artificial intelligence in the field of hematology, particularly automated hematology, since we spoke during our roundtable at this time last year?
Fernando Chaves, MD, global head of hematology, Siemens Healthineers: Technology now enables full-field digital morphology, a full image of the entire slide scan. Now we can do with hematology what has been done for over a decade in surgical pathology.

October 2022—New and better solutions for the hematology laboratory. That was at the center of a Sept. 2 virtual roundtable, led by CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle. With him were Jonathan Galeotti, MD, of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, and representatives of Sysmex America, Siemens Healthineers, Beckman Coulter, and CellaVision. “It’s a new era in terms of what can happen in hematological data,” said Fernando Chaves, MD, global head of hematology, Siemens Healthineers.