Branch Profiles for Shape Analysis

Ahstract- The necessity for characterising highly irregularly shaped objects appears in many circumstances, most prominently in biology and medicine, but also in physical sciences and elsewhere. Here, a multi-scale method for quantifying the level of branching in irregular structures is presented to extend the repertoire descriptors of shape. The method was used to classify strains of yeast colonies and to demonstrate differences in structure of newly formed cancellous bone in rats under various experimental conditions. Yeast colonies were classified with an accuracy of 1.000 (n = 10) and classification of newly formed cancellous bone into three classes achieved mean accuracy of 0.853 ±. 088 over 10 runs with data randomly sampled from the same 15 rats each run.