Seeing the wood through the trees. Combining shape information from different landmark configurations

Antonio Profico; Paolo Piras; Costantino Buzi; Antonietta Del Bove; Marina Melchionna; Gabriele Senczuk; Valerio Varano; Alessio Veneziano; Pasquale Raia; Giorgio Manzi

doi:10.4404/hystrix-00206-2019

Seeing the wood through the trees. Combining shape information from different landmark configurations

Antonio Profico^*, Paolo Piras, Costantino Buzi, Antonietta Del Bove, Marina Melchionna, Gabriele Senczuk, Valerio Varano, Alessio Veneziano, Pasquale Raia, Giorgio Manzi

^*Corresponding author for this work

Archaeology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article

Abstract

The geometric morphometric (GM) analysis of complex anatomical structures is an ever more powerful tool to study biological variability, adaptation and evolution. Here, we propose a new method (combinland), developed in R, meant to combine the morphological information contained in different landmark coordinate sets into a single dataset, under a GM context. combinland builds a common ordination space taking into account the entire shape information encoded in the starting configurations. We applied combinland to a Primate case study including 133 skulls belonging to 14 species. On each specimen, we simulated photo acquisitions converting the 3D landmark sets into six 2D configurations along standard anatomical views. The application of combinland shows statistically negligible differences in the ordination space compared to that of the original 3D objects, in contrast to a previous method meant to address the same issue. Hence, we argue combinland allows to correctly retrieve 3D-quality statistical information from 2D landmark configurations. This makes combinland a viable alternative when the extraction of 3D models is not possible, recommended, or too expensive, and to make full use of disparate sources (and views) of morphological information regarding the same specimens. The code and examples for the application of combinland are available in the Arothron R package.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	157-165
Number of pages	9
Journal	Hystrix
Volume	30
Issue number	2
Early online date	27 Nov 2019
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.4404/hystrix-00206-2019
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 27 Nov 2019

Bibliographical note

Keywords

2D images
Combinland
Geometric morphometrics
Morphology
Primates
Skull

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10.4404/hystrix-00206-2019

Seeing the wood through (2)
© 2018, Associazione Teriologica Italiana
Final published version, 2.53 MBLicence: CC BY-NC

Cite this

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title = "Seeing the wood through the trees. Combining shape information from different landmark configurations",

abstract = "The geometric morphometric (GM) analysis of complex anatomical structures is an ever more powerful tool to study biological variability, adaptation and evolution. Here, we propose a new method (combinland), developed in R, meant to combine the morphological information contained in different landmark coordinate sets into a single dataset, under a GM context. combinland builds a common ordination space taking into account the entire shape information encoded in the starting configurations. We applied combinland to a Primate case study including 133 skulls belonging to 14 species. On each specimen, we simulated photo acquisitions converting the 3D landmark sets into six 2D configurations along standard anatomical views. The application of combinland shows statistically negligible differences in the ordination space compared to that of the original 3D objects, in contrast to a previous method meant to address the same issue. Hence, we argue combinland allows to correctly retrieve 3D-quality statistical information from 2D landmark configurations. This makes combinland a viable alternative when the extraction of 3D models is not possible, recommended, or too expensive, and to make full use of disparate sources (and views) of morphological information regarding the same specimens. The code and examples for the application of combinland are available in the Arothron R package.",

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AU - Profico, Antonio

AU - Piras, Paolo

AU - Buzi, Costantino

AU - Del Bove, Antonietta

AU - Melchionna, Marina

AU - Senczuk, Gabriele

AU - Varano, Valerio

AU - Veneziano, Alessio

AU - Raia, Pasquale

AU - Manzi, Giorgio

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Seeing the wood through the trees. Combining shape information from different landmark configurations

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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