PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Memmott, Audrey
AU  - Tanner, Dylan
AU  - Cordner, Ryan
TI  - A Seven-Parameter Approach to White Blood Cell Identification
AID  - 10.29074/ascls.2023003225
DP  - 2024 Jan 01
TA  - American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science
PG  - 18--23
VI  - 37
IP  - 1
4099  - http://hwmaint.clsjournal.ascls.org/content/37/1/18.short
4100  - http://hwmaint.clsjournal.ascls.org/content/37/1/18.full
SO  - Clin Lab Sci2024 Jan 01; 37
AB  - Medical laboratory scientists routinely evaluate blood smears in the clinical laboratory. A high level of skill in white blood cell morphology is required to do the task quickly and accurately. Despite significant training and skill, medical laboratory scientists still demonstrate variability and some inaccuracies in their cell morphology skills. In this study, we proposed a series of 7 questions that can guide morphological identification of white blood cells. We validated the potential of this approach with a random forest classifier algorithm using a dataset of 3600 cells. With the 7 categories as input, the random forest model was able to classify white blood cells with an overall accuracy of 98.7%. We further demonstrated that this approach has application for medical laboratory scientists with color blindness by testing a color independent model of white blood cell identification using 5 parameters. Our approach has the potential to improve educational approaches to white blood cell morphology and could increase the consistency of manual differential results between medical laboratory scientists.