Evaluation

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Revision as of 22:44, 24 November 2021 by Mikael Häggström (talk | contribs) (→‎Counts per mm2: corrected)
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Author: Mikael Häggström [note 1]

Microscopy settings

Generally the condenser is placed in its highest position or just slightly lower. At low magnification objectives (mainly 4x and 10x objectives), the opening of the condenser (or iris) diaphragm should be wide open. For high-dry (40x) and oil-immersion objectives (100x), the diaphragm should be closed slowly while looking at a sharply focused section until the level of illumination is just slightly reduced, in order to attain optimal contrast and resolution.[1]

Low magnification has a greater span of focus compared to high magnification, so it is normal to need to focus if you're increasing magnification. However, if you find that you need to change focus even if going from high to low magnification, try the following (if you can adjust the eye piece):

  1. Use high magnification and focus on a specimen using the main focus knob.
  2. Switch to low magnification, and focus using the eye piece adjustment.

If there's a constant visual artifact, even after you've cleaned the eye piece and objective lenses with lens tissue, try raising or lowering the condenser if you can, and the artifact may disappear out of focus.

Main steps

  • Preferably, look up past medical history of the patient, mainly past cancers that could possibly appear in the current specimen.
  • Look at each microscopy slide by eye, to plan the microscopy screening so as to not miss peripheral fragments.
  • Have a systematic direction of screening through microscopy slides, such as from top left to bottom right as seen in the microscope. When the microscope makes what you see two-way mirrored, the starting position is with the objective pointing at the bottom right of the glass slide.

While learning, you will generally focus relatively more on high magnification features with high specificity, but still have a habit of learning how your cases look at low magnification as well. In time, you will increasingly correlate diseases and conditions with their overall low magnification patterns - patterns that may require 1000 words to describe and thus cannot conveniently be part of written criteria, but will nevertheless allow you to make quicker and more accurate diagnoses.

Artifacts

In microscopy, an artifact is an apparent structural detail that is caused by the processing of the specimen and is thus not a legitimate feature of the specimen. Major artifacts to account for include:

Inflammation

Counts per mm2

There are multiple situations where a finding will be quantified in terms of amount per mm2. To make such calculations, you need to know the size of the area you see in the microscope. It is usually possible to look up what theoretically would be the area, but the most reliable way of knowing is to use a calibration slide (basically a translucent ruler with 0.1 mm line resolution or smaller) to measure the diameter of your view. The area is then calculated as:

  • Area in mm2 ≈ (diameter in mm)2 x 0.79

Sometimes "high power field" (HPF) is used for area, but it has a substantially different area for different microscopes, for example:

Microscope type Area per HPF
  • Olympus BX50, BX40 or BH2 or AO or Nikon with 15x eyepiece
  • Olympus BX43 with 10x eyepiece
0.096 mm2 [3]
AO with 10x eyepiece 0.12 mm2 [3]
Nikon Eclipse E400 with 10x eyepiece and 40x objective 0.25 mm2
Leitz Ortholux 0.27 mm2 [3]
Leitz Diaplan 0.31 mm2 [3]

When your instructions are to count a specific number of HPFs, one HPF can be assumed to be 0.2 mm2.[4] If the view area in your microscope significantly differs from this area, calculate how many views you need to count as:

Views = HPFs required x 0.2
Your microscope area (in mm2)

For example, if you should count 10 HPFs and each view in your microscope shows 0.096 mm2, you should count in this many views:

10 x 0.2 ≈ 21
0.096

Notes

  1. For a full list of contributors, see article history. Creators of images are attributed at the image description pages, seen by clicking on the images. See Patholines:Authorship for details.

Main page

References

  1. Patrice F Spitalnik. Histology Laboratory Manual, Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons Columbia University. Retrieved on 2021-09-20.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 Taqi, SyedAhmed; Sami, SyedAbdus; Sami, LateefBegum; Zaki, SyedAhmed (2018). "A review of artifacts in histopathology ". Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology 22 (2): 279. doi:10.4103/jomfp.JOMFP_125_15. ISSN 0973-029X. 
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 . Infiltrating Ductal Carcinoma of the Breast (Carcinoma of No Special Type). Stanford University School of Medicine. Retrieved on 2019-10-02.
  4. Klimstra, David S.; Modlin, Irvin R.; Coppola, Domenico; Lloyd, Ricardo V.; Suster, Saul (2010). "The Pathologic Classification of Neuroendocrine Tumors ". Pancreas 39 (6): 707–712. doi:10.1097/MPA.0b013e3181ec124e. ISSN 0885-3177. 

Image sources