Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) analysis is a laboratory test to examine a sample of the fluid surrounding the brain and spinal cord. The purpose of a CSF analysis is to diagnose medical disorders that affect the central nervous system such as viral and bacterial infections, meningitis and encephalitis; tumors or cancers of the nervous system; syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease; bleeding (hemorrhaging) around the brain and spinal cord; multiple sclerosis, a disease that affects the myelin coating of the nerve fibers of the brain and spinal cord; Guillain-Barré syndrome, an inflammation of the nerve.

This new atlas offers an excellent guide to the standard approaches to CSF analysis used in laboratory.
The Atlas contains information about cells of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) under normal and pathological conditions, with illustrations of the highest quality.

Each topic and each block of figures receive a short commentary: cell type, method of cell preparation and cytological stain, microscopy magnification, morphologic variability, clinical significance and differential diagnosis.

The aim of this atlas is also to correlate various neurological diseases and in some cases their clinical stages with characteristic cytological findings, such as in various infections of the nervous system or after subarachnoid hemorrhage, in other inflammatory diseases and primary or metastatic brain neoplasmas and leukemias. In addition, the biochemical markers in cerebrospinal fluid that are useful as a supplement to such cell syndrome are listed.