STEREOLOGY FOR THE WEIBEL-PALADE BODIES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5566/ias.4005Keywords:
Hitting probabilities, motion invariant hitting measure, plane probe, right circular cylinder, slab probeAbstract
Weibel-Palade (WP) bodies are often rod shaped endothelial cell
organelles playing a role in blood coagulation processes. In 1962, E.R.
Weibel first observed a longitudinal transect of one such organelle in
an electron micrograph, measuring about . He noticed that the a priori
probability of such an event --- analogous to that of hitting both ends
of a rod by a random plane --- should be "extremely low". The main
purpose of this note is to make an educated guess of that probability
--- more precisely, the expected proportion of transects affecting both
bases of a finite right circular cylinder, among all possible isotropic
and uniform random (IUR) transparent slabs, or planes, hitting the
cylinder.
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