Prediction of relapse of pediatric acute myeloid leukemia by multidimensional flow cytometry

Background: Most patients receiving therapy for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) enter an interval in which leukemic blast cells cannot be detected by light microscopy (i.e., morphologic remission). However, many of these patients experience a subsequent re-lapse. Multidimensional flow cytom-etry, which allows the discrimination of antigens expressed on normal and malignant cells, can detect small num-bers of cancer cells in bone marrow or peripheral blood specimens. This tech-nique enables the detection of one leukemic blast cell among 103 to 10