Morphometric Tools for Landmark Data : Geometry and Biology

Morphometrics is the statistical study of biological shape and shape change. Its richest data are landmarks, points such as 'the bridge of the nose' that have biological names as well as geometric locations. This book is the first systematic survey of morphometric methods for landmark data. The methods presented here combine conventional multivariate statistical analysis with themes from plane and solid geometry and from biomathematics to support biological insights into the features of many different organs and organisms. This book will be of value to applied statisticians and geometers, as well as to all biological and biomedical researchers who need quantitative analyses of information from biomedical images.