TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vidal-Garcia, Marta
A1  - Bandara, Lashi
A1  - Keogh, J. Scott
T1  - ShapeRotator
BT  - an R tool for standardized rigid rotations of articulated three-dimensional structures with application for geometric morphometrics
JF  - Ecology and evolution
N2  - The quantification of complex morphological patterns typically involves comprehensive shape and size analyses, usually obtained by gathering morphological data from all the structures that capture the phenotypic diversity of an organism or object. Articulated structures are a critical component of overall phenotypic diversity, but data gathered from these structures are difficult to incorporate into modern analyses because of the complexities associated with jointly quantifying 3D shape in multiple structures. While there are existing methods for analyzing shape variation in articulated structures in two-dimensional (2D) space, these methods do not work in 3D, a rapidly growing area of capability and research. Here, we describe a simple geometric rigid rotation approach that removes the effect of random translation and rotation, enabling the morphological analysis of 3D articulated structures. Our method is based on Cartesian coordinates in 3D space, so it can be applied to any morphometric problem that also uses 3D coordinates (e.g., spherical harmonics). We demonstrate the method by applying it to a landmark-based dataset for analyzing shape variation using geometric morphometrics. We have developed an R tool (ShapeRotator) so that the method can be easily implemented in the commonly used R package geomorph and MorphoJ software. This method will be a valuable tool for 3D morphological analyses in articulated structures by allowing an exhaustive examination of shape and size diversity.
KW  - articulation
KW  - morphology
KW  - motion correction
KW  - multi-modular morphology
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4018
SN  - 2045-7758
VL  - 8
IS  - 9
SP  - 4669
EP  - 4675
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -