SELECTING THE SECTIONS TO BE ANALYZED
The first step before performing the Optical Fractionator probe is to choose the section fraction by examining how many slices are available to the study. The number of tissue sections available to the study depends on the size of the object being sectioned and the cut tissue thickness. Suppose there are 60 sections containing the structure of interest. A reasonable approach to the Optical Fractionator may be to use 10 to 15 of the sections (see Deciding on Precision of Sampling for more on the question of ‘how many sections?’). In this case, a fraction of 1/5 will serve us well, i.e. we will use one out of every 5 sections since 1/5 of our 60 sections is 12 sections. This is called the section sampling fraction or ssf.
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Sponsored by MBF Bioscience
developers of Stereo Investigator, the world’s most cited stereology system
