International Society for
Stereology & Image Analysis

Board

President

• Aleš Kladnik (image analysis and microscopy in plant biology; University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)

Secretary

• Bruno Figliuzzi (image processing, stochastic geometry and materials science; Mines ParisTech, France)

Treasurer

• Jitka Čočková (economics; Institute of Physiology, Prague, Czech Republic)

Immediate Past President

• Eric Pirard (particle shape analysis in geosciences; University of Liège, Belgium)

Members of the Board

• Augusto Coppi (stereology in biomedicine; School of Anatomy, University of Bristol, UK)
• Johan Debayle (image processing and analysis, mathematical morphology, pattern recognition and stochastic geometry, MINES Saint-Etienne, France)
• Karl-Anton Dorph-Petersen (stereology in biosciences; Aarhus University, Denmark)
• Aneta Gądek-Moszczak (image analysis and stereology in materials science and medicine; Cracow University of Technology, Poland)
• Dorothy E. Oorschot (stereology in biomedicine and neuroscience; University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand)
• Daniel A. Peterson (image analysis, stereology and microscopy in biomedicine; The Chicago Medical School, USA)
• M.M. Ramya (image processing, mathematical morphology and machine vision; Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science, India)
• Xiaoyan Song (stereology in materials science, visualization simulation; Beijing University of Technology, China)
• Dvoralai Wulfsohn (agricultural engineering, Geco Enterprises, Chile)

Stereology

Is this the first time you stumble on the word stereology?

From its greek roots "stereo"and"logos" the term means the "science of studying solids".

In practice, it was originally defined in modern science as "the spatial interpretation of sections". It is an interdisciplinary field that is largely concerned with the three-dimensional interpretation of planar sections of materials or tissues. It provides practical techniques for extracting quantitative information about a three-dimensional material from measurements made on two-dimensional planar sections of the material.

Stereology is a method that utilizes random, systematic sampling to provide unbiased and quantitative data. It is an important and efficient tool in many applications of microscopy (such as petrography, materials science, and biosciences including histology, bone and neuroanatomy). Stereology is a developing science with many important innovations being developed mainly in Europe. New innovations such as the proportionator continue to make important improvements in the efficiency of stereological procedures.

In addition to two-dimensional plane sections, stereology also applies to three-dimensional slabs (e.g. 3D microscope images), one-dimensional probes (e.g. needle biopsy), projected images, and other kinds of 'sampling'. It is especially useful when the sample has a lower spatial dimension than the original material. Hence, stereology is often defined as the science of estimating higher dimensional information from lower dimensional samples.

Stereology is based on fundamental principles of geometry (e.g. Cavalieri's principle) and statistics (mainly survey sampling inference). It is a completely different approach from computed tomography.

(c) Adrian Baddeley

Unbiased Stereology (book for download)

Three Dimensional Measurement in Microscopy

C.V. Howard & M.G. Reed

This book is a simple and practical guide to making unbiased 3-D measurements of microstructure via the microscope. It is not full of complex mathematics and is of use to biologists, toxicologists, pathologists, geologists and materials scientists. The techniques presented, which are statistical in nature, are tried and tested, and presented in a clear didactic style. Exercises, together with detailed worked answers are provided. The second edition, published in 2005, had three new chapters covering single object stereology, 'Petrimetrics’, or the application of survey sampling techniques to in vitro experiments, and second order stereology for local measures of spatial organisation. Unbiased stereology has been requested for nerve cell counts in neurotoxicology by the United States Food & Drug Administration, and is now being required by many journals as a condition of acceptance for research articles. This book has been continuously in print since 1998 and has more than 2,000 citations.