ABSTRACT
For relatively large specimens such as ova, embryos, and even granulocytes, these techniques are straightforward and reasonably accurate, but are of questionable use for area measurements of small organelles that must be magnified to the limits of optical resolution for viewing. Moreover, apart from the human errors inherent in the manual tracing and interpretation of cellular outline, these approaches are very slow, tedious, and impractical for the measurement of large numbers of cells. The sequence of developing film, positioning the paper or measuring devices, taking the manual measurements, and making computations implies an effort that can be measured in substantial fractions of man-hours, at a minimum. In the case of sequences of images, or 3-D images from which volume is to be measured, the amount of work becomes prohibitive.
