Tips for recognizing blasts in a blood smear: evaluate chromatin structure compared to erythroblasts, population monotony, and cell arrangement.
Three tips for classifying blasts:
📌 Look for an erythroblast or lymphocyte to compare chromatin between them (lymphocytes/erythroblasts have coarser chromatin, while blasts have delicate, reticular chromatin). 📌Cellular monotony: in acute leukemia, blasts are very similar to each other. 📌Blasts are usually located close to each other.
Morphological features of blasts: differentiation from promyelocytes and reactive lymphocytes, comparison of myeloblasts and monoblasts, changes on the scattergram.
Distinguishing blasts from mature lymphocytes in blood smears: evaluating cell size, cytoplasmic basophilia, chromatin density, and nucleoli visualization.
A clinical case of an 86-year-old patient with 17% blasts in the blood: morphological criteria for assessing immature cells and differential diagnostics in a blood smear.
