Bone marrow fibre production in myelofibrosis: a quantitative study.

A digital image processing technique has been used to quantitate bone marrow fibre in histological material (both biopsy and necropsy) from 17 cases of myelofibrosis. An attempt was made to correlate the results of these measurements with other diagnostically relevant parameters. Bone marrow fibre was found to correlate significantly with absolute neutrophil count, the absolute count of immature granulocytic cells and with the number of immature granulocytic cells expressed as a percentage of the total leucocyte count. There was no significant correlation between marrow fibre content and platelet count for the series as a whole, but for those cases in which measurements were made following splenectomy these parameters were highly correlated. Bone marrow fibre content did not appear to correlate with liver or spleen weight at necropsy, nor with the duration of clinical manifestations of the disease. The significance of these findings is discussed.