Introduction and Classification of Leukemias

Classifying the hematological malignancies by assigning cells to their normal counterpart and describing the nature of disease progression are entirely reliant on an accurate picture for the development of the multifarious types of blood and immune cells. In recent years, our understanding of the complex relationships between the various hematopoietic stem cell-derived cell lineages has undergone substantial revision. There has been similar progress in how we describe the nature of the "target" cells that genetic insults transform to give rise to the hematological malignancies. Here I describe how both longstanding and new information has influenced classifying, for diagnosis, the hematological malignancies.