How to read a flow cytometry report: a guide for patients and non-specialist physicians
A flow cytometry report lands on a desk and, for most people who are not hematologists, it reads like a decoded transmission from another discipline — columns of percentages, cryptic CD numbers, gates that look like abstract art. That gap matters clinically, because misreading a single value can push a patient toward an unnecessary biopsy or, worse, delay a referral that should have happened last week. This walkthrough takes a standard CD34+ report, the kind issued after a peripheral blood or bone marrow collection, and explains each major panel in plain language. The goal is not to replace specialist interpretation but to give patients and generalist physicians enough vocabulary to ask the right questions in the room. Stem Lab Zone's team reviewed anonymized report formats from multiple accredited South African hematology laboratories and found that the three panels causing the most confusion were CD34 enumeration, the lymphocyte scatter gate, and the viability readout — so those get the most space here. Read more →