Unbiased stereological quantification of neurons in the human spiral ganglion

We applied an unbiased stereological technique, the optical fractionator, on five human archival temporal bone specimens to estimate the total number of spiral ganglion neurons. Available archival human temporal bone specimen has been serially sectioned at 20 microm and every tenth section was stained. All the stained sections passing through the spiral ganglion were used for the analysis. From each section sampled, the counting areas were systematically randomly sampled within the sectional area of the spiral ganglion. The neurons within the counting areas sampled were counted with the optical disector technique. The total number of the human spiral ganglion neurons was estimated by multiplying the number of neurons counted by the reciprocal of the aggregate sampling fraction. We found an average of 41700 neurons with a coefficient of variation of 0.14, which is a significant departure from the previously published data obtained with the assumption-based methods. The mean coefficient of error for the stereological estimates of the total number of human spiral ganglion neurons was 0.078. The present report presents unbiased stereological sampling and counting strategies for the future quantitative studies on the spiral ganglion neurons. The result of the present study provides the first unbiased baseline value of the human spiral ganglion neurons.