ABSTRACT

Recently, the rapid availability of the results of complete blood count (CBC) could provide considerable advantage for both patients and clinicians. Many automated hematology counting has replaced manual microscopic counting, but not achieved widespread acceptance in routine practice. The aim of this study was to compare with differential leukocyte counts in microscopic examination and CELL DYN 4000 analyzer

The differential leukocyte counts of CBC by Cell Dyn 4000 autoanalyzer and microscopic examination were evaluated in 450 consecutive children with 614 samples

The mean neutrophil, lymphocyte and monocyte values were not significantly different between microscopic examination and automated hematology analyzer, but all of each values showed very good correlations (p<0.05). Flagging for blast, immature granulocyte (IG) and variant lymphocyte (VL) showed low sensitivity and high specificity for disease diagnosis, but the moderate sensitivity and high specificity for automated hematology analyzer was higher than that of the microscopic examination

It can be concluded that microscopic examination should be preserved in such cases with clinical signs and symptoms even if abnormal flags for IG, blast and VL parameters may not have been apparent from the autoanalyzer