Summary
It is possible to determine statistically the repartitions of shapes or sizes in a population of particles from the recurrence of shapes or sizes of their outlines in microscopical sections. This method was applied to a population of 1326 follicular profiles randomly sampled from 30 ovaries of pubescent homozygous “Nude” mice. Under experimental conditions, the follicles were not spherical but could be assimilated to prolate ellipsoids with a mean eccentricity of 0.81. The average radius of the follicles taken as a whole was 20.2±0.7 (S.E.) μm. From these, the average radius of only the non-primary follicles was 58.1±1.3 (S.E.) μm. The volumetric repartition of the ovarian follicles indicated that 62% of the total follicular mass was made of follicles with a radius greater than 115 μm, although these represent only 2% of the total number of follicles.
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Dedicated to Professor Dr. Drs. h.c. W. Bargmann on the occasion of his 70th birthday
The present work was partly performed at the Department of Histology, University of Louvain (Belgium) under tenure of a Personal Career Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation
I wish to thank Prof. P. Baudhuin (Louvain) and Dr. A. Achour (Fribourg) who made their computing facilities available. The technical skills of Mrs. H. Toffel are gratefully acknowledged. My thanks as well to Miss M. Aebischer for typing the manuscript and help with the computer data.
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Sprumont, P. Ovarian follicles of normal NMRI mice and homozygous “Nude” mice. Cell Tissue Res. 170, 341–351 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00219416
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00219416