Introduction



What is the purpose of this material?

You get practical advice about the morphology of blood and bone marrow smears. You find here useful information about how to get prepared for the pathophysiology exam in the 3rd grade of Semmelweis Medical University. Lots of microscopical images are available to aid your learning.

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What is the best approach to learn hematological morphology?

First of all you must get yourself to learn the maturation stages, morphological characteristics of the cell lines (e.g. the erythroid or the granulocytic line) that are present in the normal bone marrow. You may use any good book or other source for that. You may see/draw pictures while doing this, but you really need to learn it as text, that is you must be able to describe the morphological characteristics of any maturation stage in any cell line using the proper technical terms.

Once you mastered the morphological characteristics, study as many smears in a microscope as you can. This is much more fun, but it is completely useless to look at the smears in the microscope before learning the cell lines, because you won't know what to observe, what is important.

It helps a lot at this stage, if you read about the clinical features of diseases mentioned in the course. You may use any good internal medicine or clinical hematology textbook. This will give you a solid background into which you can fit what you learn from pathophysiology. This approach makes it easier for you to remember what you learnt. One is more likely to forget individual things if they have no connection.

These pages were written in order to help you in all of the above-mentioned phases of learning.

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Do I need to use a microscope as well, or it's enough to read this?

You must study real smears in a real microscope. Nothing else will do. One reason is, that the pictures that you see here have lower resolution, contrast and color quality than a good microscopical field has. The other reason is, that looking at these still pictures doesn't give you the same information and feeling that a thourough examination of a real smear provides. These comments also apply to any other study aid, as well, including hematological atlases, slide sets etc.!

All in all, no matter how wonderful this www material is ;-) it only adds to what you can learn at the pathophysiology practice, doesn't make it unnecessary.

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László L. Tornóci
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