Proposal and investigation of the paraffin-agar sandwich method, a new cell block manufacturing method

Abstract

We devised a new cell block (CB) manufacturing method called the ‘paraffin-agar sandwich method’ and then compared it with conventional CB manufacturing methods such as the ‘fibrin clot method’, ‘agar method’, and ‘sodium alginate method’. The purpose of this study was to investigate the cellular collections and staining conditions of body fluid cavity specimens that were processed using the four CB manufacturing methods. Our results showed that among the four CB manufacturing methods, the paraffin-agar sandwich and agar methods provided significantly larger numbers of cells derived from cell pellets of 10 or 50 μL volume than the fibrin clot method. When cell pellets of 100 μL volume were used, the paraffin-agar sandwich method provided significantly larger numbers of cells than both the fibrin clot and sodium alginate methods. The investigation of the staining conditions in the different preparation backgrounds showed more contamination of the preparation background in both the fibrin clot and sodium alginate methods than in the other methods. Therefore, it was shown that the paraffin-agar sandwich method is an improvement over the other CB methods for cellular collection and that it may be used for various purposes.