Our aim was to aid the hematology courses of the Hungarian medical universities with this www material. We hope, however, that it will be useful for other people, as well. For this reason it is freely available to read in the spirit of the Internet. The text and pictures are, however, not in the public domain, cannot be copied or used without permission. (See Copyright for details).
This work is not finished, we plan to extend and improve it. We welcome new ideas, contributions in any form (good quality smears, slides, digital images) comments or criticism from hematologists.
This is the first attempt of the Institute of Pathophysiology, Semmelweis University to create an educational www material. We have had plans before to create a hematological teaching aid and started to work on it using classical video technology. We got some funding in a project of the NIIF to put it on the web. What you see now is the English translation of the original Hungarian version. We are anxious to see, how it is received by students and the public. If it proves to be useful we will try to create further educatonal materials. Please, feel free to tell us your comments.
A display with a resolution of 800 by 600 pixels (or better) is recommended, but the most important thing is the number of colors, that can be simultaneously shown. If this is 16, don't even try to look at our pictures. There is a significant change in the quality of our smears even at 8 bit color depth (256 simultaneous colors). What happens is that your graphic card/display will 'dither' certain colors (instead of using a pixel of the proper color it tries to approximate it with several pixels of other colors it can display). You not only see false colors, but there is also an apparent loss of resolution as well. Therefore, it is highly recommended to have a 16 bit color depth dislay (64k colors or 'hicolor') or better (24 or 32 bit color, also called "millions of colors" or "truecolor"). This usually requires 2MB video RAM for your graphics card. The picures are in compressed (JPEG) format, so the downloading times of even our high resolution pictures are acceptable using a 14.4 kbit/s modem. If you are on the ethernet LAN of SOTE (library or Students' Center), everything will be much faster, of course.
You can use any graphical www browser you like, as long as it supports tables. We recommend Netscape 2.x or 3.x on most platforms. If you use OS/2 and don't have Netscape, Webexplorer 1.1e will do.