There is no rationale to still rely on outdated; biased tools for quantitative morphology in pulmonary research

摘要

Pulmonary research was once the scientific area that most significantly contributed to conceptual and methodological progress in the development of quantitative morphology. The pioneering work of Weibel and co-workers [1-5] provided the basis for what is now called design-based stereology. The basic methods of lung fixation, of sampling strategies ensuring that specimens, sections and microscopic fields of view representative of the whole organ (i.e. systematic uniform random samples) are collected, and of designing appropriate test systems for the analysis of volume, surface area and length of a structure of interest, were established during those early days. These tools have successfully been used in pulmonary research to gain insights into important structure-function relationships, aspects of lung development, pulmonary function and pathogenetic mechanisms in lung diseases (see [5-8] for references to original work).