“…Therefore, additional diagnostic procedures as histology, molecular sequencing analyses, and flow cytometry (FCM) have to be conducted (Valent et al, 2017). FCM as one of these methods is subjected to several standardization efforts within the iMDS Flow working group (iMDSFlow) of the European leukemia net (ELN) in the last decade (Porwit et al, 2014; van de Loosdrecht et al, 2009; Westers et al, 2012); this issue is addressed in more detail in three separate papers in this special issue of Cytometry Part B: Clinical Cytometry (Porwit et al, 2021; van de Loosdrecht et al, 2021; Van der Felden et al, 2021). Several diagnostic MDS FCM‐scores have been published, for example, FCM scoring system (FCSS, Wells et al, 2003) mainly analyzing granulo‐ and monopoiesis, Ogata‐score (Della Porta et al, 2012; Ogata et al, 2009) focusing on progenitor cells, RED‐score and ELN‐NEC (Mathis et al, 2013; Westers et al, 2017) with an emphasis on nucleated erythropoietic cells (NEC), and integrated flow‐score (iFS, Cremers et al, 2017) comprising aspects of all the aforementioned FCM‐scores (Table 1).…”