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 probe, rodAbstract
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 0.06 µm × 1.0 µm. 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) slabs, or planes, hitting the cylinder.
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