ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of modern stereology. It may serve as an introduction and guide to the more detailed accounts in the following chapters.
A transition from ‘classical’ to ‘modern’ stereology occurred in the late 1970’s. The modern theory differs by having rigorous statistical foundations (Section 3.2), involving a variety of random sampling designs (Section 3.3), offering a wider range of stereological identities than the Fundamental Formulae of Stereology (Section 3.4), and using a wider range of stochastic models (Section 3.5). We begin by explaining the motivation for these developments in Section 3.1.
