The revolution of counting 'tops': two decades of the disector principle in morphological research

Twenty years have passed since the publication of the seminal paper enunciating the disector principle by an author using the pseudonym D.C. Sterio. During this time, methods based on the revolutionary principle of counting 'tops' have become progressively better known and have been included in several commercially available systems for quantitative morphology. Analysis of the number of published studies citing Sterio's paper on the ISI Web of Knowledge database showed that its scientific 'impact factor' has almost continuously risen since its publication, indicating the growing knowledge about disector-based methods in the various scientific fields where morphological quantification is required. This report briefly reviews the first two decades of disector use, pointing to its advantages as well as to shortcomings that have recently been addressed in critical papers and have given rise to a lively debate on the role of counting tops in quantitative morphology today.