Quantitation of Bone Area in Undecalcified Frozen Sections With Fluorescent Microscopy

Histomorphometry is a useful tool for assessing the dynamics of bone in orthopaedic research. We compared a new fluorescence imaging method with a commonly used computer-interactive manual method using hematoxylin and eosin staining to quantify the total bone area in 6-μm thick frozen undecalcified sections processed from a bone chamber. Eighteen sections were analyzed by both methods, and the correlation coefficient was 0.92. The advantages of the fluorescence imaging are that it is simple, objective, and correlates strongly with traditional more tedious methods for histomorphometric analysis of bone. (The J Histotechnol 31:15, 2008)Submitted July 24, 2007; accepted with revisions January 9, 2008