The Black Box problem

For many people stereology is a black box. Most people do not understand what is required but are able to enter some numbers and then see one or more numbers spit out by the black box.

Consider the follow simple problem. There is a tract of land with trees on it. A question that can be asked of the trees is the mean diameter of the trees. The method selected to determine mean diameter is to wrap a tape around the tree and to read off the length. This is the perimeter of the tree trunk. Divide that by pi to obtain the mean diameter of the tree trunk. Another way to do this is to make a tape measure that is in units of pi. At pi centimeters write 1, at 2pi centimeters write 2, and so forth to make a tape where the measurements taken do not require the additional step of dividing by pi.

This sounds all well and good. There is a problem.

This simple stereological procedure does not provide the mean diameter of the tree trunk.

The value that is measured here is always greater than the mean diameter except in the case of a circle.

If you buy a tape for forestry it is marked as described above. It provides a measure of the tree. Should that tape claim to provide a measure of the mean diameter and you did not know better then you would move forward with the wrong understanding of the measurements being taken.

The same applies to other products that provide stereological results. Do not treat them as a black box. Understand what needs to be done. Use a spreadsheet of your own making to check the results of the product. Check the computed results. Make sure that the inputs are what is required. Do not trust the protocols provided by automated equipment. Independently verify that the protocols are correct.

Failure to understand stereological protocols can be a problem. Articles have been published that had to be withdrawn because the work was done without the researcher having taken the time to learn stereological methods.

Degradation of a bad article

Earlier this month I stumbled upon a short write up that has circulated on the web for a while. It was inaccurate to start with but somehow it is being copied and altered slightly becoming even worse.

Shortly after the initial stereology discussion on the Feldberg, Prof. Elias sent a tiny statement on the trial to the biography Science. Soon thereafter, he received an heated reply from researchers in academia, supervision agencies, and in isolation attention at institutions around the world. They contacted Prof. Elias for data about the next stereology meeting. What Elias suspected had been correct — scientists opposite extended disciplines compulsory right away approaches is to analyses of 3-D objects formed on their look on 2-D sections.

This is from the following link (purposely altered to prevent a link to the site in question).
http://boatsforhelp . com/boat-help/the-history-of-modern-stereology/

The original write up was just plain wrong.

In 1637, Bonaventura Cavalieri, a tyro of Galileo Galilei in Florence during the high Italian Renaissance, showed that the meant volume of a race of non-classically made objects could be estimated fairly from the total of areas on the cut surfaces of the objects (right). The Cavalieri Principle provides the basement is to volume determination of biological structures from their areas on hankie sections.

Cavalieri did not deal with estimations. The principle dealt with showing that 2 objects had the same volume.

[quote]In 1777, Count George Leclerc Buffon presented the Needle Problem to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, France. The Needle Problem reserve the luck theory for stream approaches to guess the aspect area and length of biological objects in an unprejudiced (accurate) manner.[/quote]
Buffon was a nickname. The year was 1733 and he did not show the needle problem to the RAS. The needle problem can be used to derive methods for the estimation of length, but it does not lead to area estimations.

[quote]In 1847, the French mining operative and geologist, Auguste Delesse, demonstrated that the approaching worth is to volume of an intent varies in directly suit to the celebrated area on a pointless division cut by the object. The Delesse Principle provides the basement for precise and effective determination of intent and regions volumes by indicate counting.[/quote]
Delesse's method leads to volume fractions. He was not interested in volumes. Furthermore, the technique he developed was too cumbersome to use. It was neglected after Delesse himself used it for a short while.

Hopefully, such poorly constructed copies of the original incorrect article are not copied more and more about the internet.

A meeting of the ISS, the International Stereology Society, will be held in October of this year in Beijing. The meeting will be held October 19 to October 23, 2011. During that meeting new concepts in stereology will be presented along with studies that discuss the implementation of stereological methods.

The ISS, founded in 1961 and incorporated in 1963,
includes members from the fields of mathematics,
statistics, biology, and materials science. The
purpose of the ISS is to promote the exchange and
dissemination of information on stereology amongst
persons of various scientific disciplines and countries.
Stereology is nominally the science of determining
the spatial structure of materials on the basis of
sections and projections through the materials.
Furthermore, stereology embraces the analysis of
planar images per se, and three-dimensional probes
of materials. A main concern of the ISS is the
practical applications of stereology. The ISS
promotes such practical fields, including Image
Analysis and Processing, Stochastic Geometry,http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Mathematical Morphology, Pattern Recognition,
and Fractal Geometry.

When information about the papers being presented becomes available I will post it.

For now visit http://www.ics13.beijing.org for more information.