Quantitative Analysis of Steroid Autoradiograms , .

Two types of quantitative criteria are compared that have been used to discriminate labeled and nonlabeled cells in steroid autoradiograms: multiplicative criteria and a criterion based on the Poisson distribution. Several factors affect the accuracy of the assessment of cell labeling, including variations in the length of exposure, variations in cell size, and possible nonlinearities in the grain density of autoradiograms as a function of exposure time. These factors have a greater effect on the accuracy of the determination of cell labeling when using multiplicative criteria, so that the Poisson criterion is more suitable.