Re: BrdU cell counting

Posted by Gabriel Landini on Jan 17, 2014; 2:42pm
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/BrdU-cell-counting-tp5006086p5006153.html

On Friday 17 Jan 2014 13:19:48 Burri Olivier wrote:
> > How many cells do you recommend measuring for a good estimation of
> > number of cells? Would a 100 be ok?
>
> As a rule of thumb, 100 cells could yield a good estimate. But this is very
> dependent on the kind of change you are expecting.

I am afraid that arbitrary numbers like "100" sound like "made up" numbers.

While 100 might be enough, really nobody knows what your data might look like
and you could do (statistically) better than that.

To find out how much data you need to collect, you need to apply a procedure
called "power analysis".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_power

That takes into account the variability of the data and the difference size
you are expecting to detect for a particular significance value. That way you
can obtain a statistically based estimate of the data size you need to
collect.
Without this you might be collecting too much data unnecessarily or too little
and assume there are no differences when actually they exist.

Cheers

Gabriel

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