Hematological malignancies represent a wide range of disease entities,
most of which arise from dysfunctional proliferation and differentiation
of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells in the bone marrow [1].
Diagnosis requires integration of cytomorphology, molecular genetics,
and immunophenotyping from blood or bone marrow. Unlike bone marrow
aspiration, assessing cytomorphology in a blood smear is fast, minimally
invasive, and provides information on differential cell counts and
morphological abnormalities that guide follow-up diagnostic pathways.
However, conventional peripheral blood smear analysis involves
labor-intensive manual examination of hundreds of cells, which is
subject to inter-observer variability. Previous work explored
machine-learning for single-cell classification [2, 3], and disease detection [4,5,6,7,8,9]
on curated cohorts. Systematic evaluation across multiple malignancies
at their natural clinical distribution remains unexplored.