Quantitative assessment of the glandular activity of endocrine cells of gastrointestinal mucosae by computer-assisted analysis of ultrastructural images: methodology

A method is described for studying the morphological features of endocrine cells of gastrointestinal mucosae in man and some animal species by semi-automatic analysis of ultrastructural images. The method enables possible ultrastructural variations in gastrointestinal endocrine glandular cells of different types to be determined with an acceptable margin of error. Various causes of error are investigated. It is found that the main cause is the choice of microscope magnification, despite the corrections made. The factor of inconsistency in the reproducibility of measurements performed by several operators is also calculated.