It is an important and efficient tool in many applications of microscopy (such as petrography, materials science, and biosciences including histology, bone and neuroanatomy).
[citation needed] New innovations such as the proportionator continue to make important improvements in the efficiency of stereological procedures.
This reflects the founders' idea that stereology also offers insights and rules for the qualitative interpretation of sections.
Stereologists have helped to detect many fundamental scientific errors arising from the misinterpretation of plane sections.
On the contrary, stereological techniques require only a few 'representative' plane sections, from which they statistically extrapolate the three-dimensional material.
In addition to using geometrical facts, stereology applies statistical principles to extrapolate three-dimensional shapes from plane section(s) of a material.
These methods have gained increasing popularity in the biomedical sciences, especially in lung-, kidney-, bone-, cancer- and neuro-science.
Many classical stereological techniques, in addition to assuming homogeneity, also involved mathematical modeling of the geometry of the structures under investigation.
These methods are still popular in materials science, metallurgy and petrology where shapes of e.g. crystals may be modelled as simple geometrical objects.