List Price: $219
Credits: 6.5 CMLE
Course Director:
Lewis Glasser, MD
Director of Hematopathology, Pathology Department, Rhode Island Hospital
Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Brown University School of Medicine, Providence, RI

If you’re responsible for body fluid analysis in the clinical laboratory, understanding disease-related changes in body fluids is essential in your partnership to provide accurate and prompt patient diagnosis and treatment. Attend this workshop to increase your skills and confidence in analyzing various body fluids and avoid the problems associated with the complexities of evaluation, differentiation, and identification that are unique to body fluid testing. Serous, synovial, cerebrospinal, and seminal fluids will be discussed with regard to physiology, chemical analytes, and cellular morphology. Topics will include contaminants, how the timing between collection and testing impacts results, and deciding when cells in fluids indicate a pathologic condition. You’ll study crystals and artifacts encountered in body fluids and the use of the cytocentrifuge in obtaining optimum specimens. Body fluid changes and the appearance of cellular elements, including tumor cells, as seen in Wright-stained smears, will be emphasized.

Following this workshop, you will be able to:

• Review the pathogenesis of body fluid formation
• Discuss collection requirements for laboratory analysis of body fluids
• List methods of specimen preparation for body fluid morphology
• Identify normal and abnormal cellular elements encountered in body fluids
• Identify crystals in synovial fluid
• Describe chemical changes in body fluids