Analysis of the trade-offs between manual and computer-based stereology/classification

Estimation of volume, surface area, area, length and number in stereology is based on a manual count of the number of intersections between the feature of interest and a specific low-resolution geometrical test probe. It is usually a tedious and imprecise process, hut benefits from the user's ability to identify the feature of interest. In computer-based stereology, by contrast, a high-resolution test probe is used, generally yielding greater precision but suffering from imperfection of the automated classification. The trade-offs between manual and computer-based stereology are introduced and the conditions under which each is advantageous are defined.