ABSTRACT

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A shared characteristic of all life forms, both single and multicellular, is the ability to move and change shape. The study of biological shape changes is, therefore, extremely important to biological and biomedical research. In this chapter, techniques for extracting shape-change parameters from biological image sequences are described. With current technologies, image sequences may be twodimensional (2-D), such as those produced in standard video microscopy and X-ray cinematography, or three-dimensional (3-D), such as those produced by 3-D laser-scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and other tomographic techniques. The image sequence contains information about the shape-change and motion of the imaged object. The nontrivial task of shape-change analysis is to extract the meaningful information from the image sequence.