Figure 2.

Evaluation of the minimum area required for quantitative analyses of CD68, CD3 and CD20 cells. For each of the tissue markers studied, a plot was generated to show the effects of increasing sample size (that is, the number of high-power fields examined) and the proximity of this sample mean from the overall determination of area fraction. Data represent the mean values of all cases. As the number of high-power fields examined increases, the difference between the sampling mean and the overall mean reduces. A threshold value of 10% of the overall mean (arrows) was set as providing a reasonable estimator of the true sample mean.