EDGE EFFECTS IN THE ESTIMATION OF THE NUMBER OF CELLS BY THE QUADRATE METHOD

Abstract

Counting cells in a photomicrograph of a tissue section, we frequently encounter the cells riding on the boundary lines of the quadrate. In this paper we proposed a method for counting those cells and discussed the edge effect in the estimation of the number of cells. The cells on the boundary lines were counted as the fraction: one by the number of portions divided with the boundary lines. By this method the variance of the estimator was smaller than by the Thoma-Zeiss method.