Fig. 1.

Representative images of bladder washing, peritoneal and pleural fluid cytology samples using three different processing protocols (Table 1). All the cases were evaluated by 5 pathologists for background (clean, proteinaceous or containing blood), morphology and staining characteristics of the nucleus (contours in agreement with the standard, contours in disagreement with the standard, tinctorial pattern of chromatin in agreement with the standard or tinctorial pattern of chromatin in disagreement with the standard); morphology and staining characteristics of the cytoplasm (contours in agreement with the standard, contours in disagreement with the standard, tinctorial pattern in agreement with the standard or tinctorial pattern in disagreement with the standard). For all the cases studied, there were no significant morphological differences when processing protocols 1 or 3 were compared. Protocol 2 results are satisfactory for urine samples, but fairly suboptimal for peritoneal and pleural fluid specimens (H&E staining; 400× magnification).