Utility of a Fluorescence Microscopy Imaging System for Analyzing the DNA Ploidy of Pathological Megakaryocytes Including 5q- Syndrome

To investigate megakaryocyte(MK) DNAploidy in various hematological diseases, fluorescence microscopy imaging system (FMI) can be used to analyze DNAploidy with cell morphology at the single-cell level by using specialized image-processing software. Here we compared DNAploidy obtained by FMI measured with that obtained flow cytometry (FCM). With FMI, we could evaluate the DNAploidy in long-term preserved bone marrow smear samples after staining. We next analyzed the MK DNAploidy in 42 bone marrow smear samples including 26 myeloid neoplasm cases, and we compared the DNAploidy and platelet counts in the patients' peripheral blood; the production of platelets was significantly high compared to DNAploidy in the myeloproliferative neoplasmsgroup. The FMI method revealed that the patients with 5q- syndrome exhibited relatively low DNAploidy despite high platelet counts, and this result suggested that increased DNAploidy is not indispensable to abundant platelet production. The FMI method for DNAploidy will be a useful tool to clarify the relationship between DNAploidy and platelet production by MKs.