Measuring Volume and Surface Area
THE MICROSCOPE
2020, Volume 68:3/4, pp. 151–155
DOI
https://doi.org/10.59082/SCDE1405
AUTHOR
John C. Russ
ABSTRACT
High quality computer-gene rated visualizations of 3-D datasets obtained with a variety of microscopies are used in many different fields of application. It seems natural to attempt to perform measurements of the volume within or under a surface, and the area of that surface, as these values can be related to various properties of the subjects. There are concerns, however, with the methods that may be applied to perform the measurements, and it is instructive to examine the consequences of the procedures applied to the raw image data to generate the surface renderings and/or to estimate the 3-D measurements. The effects of these procedures on volumes are relatively modest, but surface areas are highly dependent on the resolution of the original data and the processing and measurement operations, and the results are generally unreliable.