*****Commercial Announcement Regarding Confocal Stereology ******
This is a response to Earl Stanford question regarding 3-D volumetric
measurements and as this has an aspect of commercial announcement (as well
as scientific content), I've started a new thread.
I am a product scientist specializing in stereology solution for Visiopharm,
and I would like to let you know that Visiopharm can integrate to confocal
microscopes for true stereological quantification that uses systematic
uniform random sampling in selection of the fields of view to quantify from.
Using stereology, one can obtain unbiased estimation of the structure of
interest (e.g. volume, length, count, surface area, local volume and cross
sectional area estimation) and many journals now require stereological
quantification for brightfield and widefield microscopy.
At the moment, no journal that I know of requires this for confocal
microscopes as not many people have been aware of the fact that one can
indeed perform confocal stereology. By this, what we mean is a bona fide
method of sampling from correct fields by controlling the stage position
from the stereology software in a systematic uniform random manner. This
does not mean that the user is choosing the field of view to quantify from,
capturing images, then plugging these images to a stereology package. This
latter approach introduces sampling bias, and is not a valid method of
performing stereological quantification. As a growing number of scientists
are aware of the importance of stereological sampling, the number of labs
using confocal stereology is growing and the trend for publication
requirements will certainly follow.
Stereological quantification is differentiated from volume rendering or
other exhausitive quantification method in that one can sample to make the
quantificaiton process much more efficient while being completely unbiased
with no assumptions regarding the shape, size and orientation of the
structure of interest.
I personally have used Zeiss LSM510 extensively as a postdoc and I was
unable to perform stereological quantification for my studies as confocal
stereology tool was not yet available. I sincerely hope that many
scientists reading this become aware of the ability to perform true confocal
stereology and can take advantage of these latest technological advances.
At the moment, Visiopharm can integrate to Zeiss LSM 510 and 710, Leica,
Olympus DSU, and are in development to integrate to several other confocals
currently out in the market today. Please contact me at
[hidden email]
for further information. Thank you.
Locked
