The History Of Modern Stereology
Stereology literally translates from the Greek as
, the study of objects in 3-D. The 3-D analysis of objects dates to ancient Egypt and the development of Euclidean geometry. Stereology, however, officially began as a scientific discipline until less than half a century ago at a meeting of diverse researchers from fields of biology, geology, engineering, and materials sciences in 1961. A biologist, Professor Hans Elias, had the idea to organize this meeting at a resort called the Feldberg in the Black Forest of Germany for the benefit of scientists in several disciplines who had one thing in common: They were struggling with the quantitative analysis of 3-D images based on their appearance on 2-D sections. At this meeting, Prof. Elias suggested stereology as a useful term to describe their discussions.
Shortly after the first stereology meeting on the Feldberg, Prof. Elias sent a small announcement on the proceedings to the journal Science. Soon thereafter, he received an intense response from researchers in academia, government agencies, and private industry at institutions around the world. They contacted Prof. Elias for information about the next stereology meeting. What Elias suspected had been right -- scientists across broad disciplines required now approaches for the analyses of 3-D objects based on their appearance on 2-D sections.
The International Society For Stereology
The following year the International Society For Stereology (ISS) was established with the 1st Congress of the International society for Stereology (ISS). At this congress, Prof. Hans Elias was elected the founding president (Table 1).
The First Decade Of Stereology (1961-1971)
As the result of recent technological innovations in microscopy, biologists in the 1960s could view tissues, cells, blood vessels and other objects in tissue with greater clarity and specificity than ever before. These developments included the availability of affordable, high-resolution optics for light microscopy; refinements in electron microscopy instruments and methods for preparation of specimens; and, immune-based visualization of specific proteins in biological tissue (immunocytochemistry). With the ability to see more objects in greater detail than ever before, they began to ask the obvious question: How much is there?
To answer this question, biologists focused on a simple goal: To obtain reliable 3-D information about biological objects based on their 2-D appearance. For ideas on how to proceed, they turned toward the objective mathematic-based methods emerging from the field of stereology.
At ISS congresses held every other year, stereologists from many disciplines began to present research and discuss their theories on how best to solve their common problems. Biologists attending these meetings discovered that their stereology colleagues in different fields had developed practical approaches that would be of immediate use in their research, including the following:
In 1637, Bonaventura Cavalieri, a student of Galileo Galilei in Florence during the high Italian Renaissance, showed that the mean volume of a population of non-classically shaped objects could be estimated accurately from the sum of areas on the cut surfaces of the objects (right). The Cavalieri Principle provides the basis for the volume estimation of biological structures from their areas on tissue sections.
In 1777, Count George Leclerc Buffon presented the Needle Problem to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, France. The Needle Problem supplies the probability theory for current approaches to estimate the surface area and length of biological objects in an unbiased (accurate) manner.
In 1847, the French mining engineer and geologist, Auguste Delesse, demonstrated that the expected value for the volume of an object varies in directly proportion to the observed area on a random section cut through the object. The Delesse Principle provides the basis for accurate and efficient estimation of object and regions volumes by point counting.
by: Peter R. Mouton, Ph.D
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