Recent stereological methods for cell biology: a brief survey.

With the advent of many new tools over the last five years, stereology has become simpler, assumption-free, and more efficient but, at the same time, new terms and concepts have proliferated, which risk overwhelming potential users. The present review is intended to meet the urgent need for a structured classification and evaluation of the newest stereological methods. Being fairly comprehensive, the exposition is necessarily succinct: the reader is referred to selected references for the necessary details and examples.