Veterinary diagnostic cytology: advantages and conflicts

Diagnostic cytology sciences and techniques may be firs-line of the diagnostic pathology in medicine and veterinary medicine. Cytologists can provide rapid and reliable findings for clinical practitioners prescribing patients precisely. Although anatomical pathology may present definite results, it needs more time and expenses. Hence, diagnostic cytology can be served as more rapid substitute giving very near findings to the ones with anatomical pathology. Diagnostic cytology has a great importance in veterinary medicine comparing to the medicine filed. Despite treatment approaches used by medical practitioners, veterinary practitioners tend to perform a complete cycle of treatment in single visit of the sick animals. So, they need to take more complete para-clinical helps including laboratory diagnosis as possible. In this way, fast and reliable results including hematologic, biochemistry and cytological findings have an immense role in the directions of the therapy protocols. Although diagnostic cytology has been vastly developed and expanded in the small animal practice (especially dog and cat), this field has a minor or no role in large animal practice, while many reference cytology books have been published for small animals, there is no such literature for large animals. Beside many advantages of the diagnostic cytology, there are some limitations suffering veterinary laboratory specialists/technicians. These drawbacks include lack of rapid Romanowsky staining methods/techniques, lack of some specific staining methods, lack of immunocytochemical staining methods, and limitations related to the microscopic scanning and imaging devices.