As a licensed medical technologist I've never seen anything like this in a book or examining a slide of blood under the microscope. I can't say why they used the pin-prick method to obtain the blood sample - there is no anticoagulant involved with this and sometimes platelets will clump and cause other things around them to clump as well. It'd be interesting to see if the same results happened with the typical blood sample taken from a vein into a tube containing the anti-coagulant EDTA.
There are times when novel blood cells appear that don't match textbook examples. For instance in leukemia, most of the time the cells look like the textbook examples, but occasionally they can't be matched to anything, but they're clearly abnormal. At that point the tech can notify the referring hematologist that his patient has very unusual cells, essentially saying, "He's your patient, you can call these cells whatever you want." This is AFTER all other avenues of discovery have been exhausted to determine what they are. That involves having several techs review the slide, having a pathologist and/or hematologist review it.
I'm very surprised by this discovery. Thanks for posting.
