Shape recognition deals with the study geometric structures. Modern surface processing methods can cope with non-rigidity by measuring the lack of isometry, deal with similarity by multiplying the Euclidean arc-length by the Gaussian curvature, and manage equi-affine transformations by resorting to the special affine arc-length definition in classical affine geometry. Here, we propose a computa...

In the course of animal development, the shape of tissue emerges in part from mechanical and biochemical interactions between cells. Measuring stress in tissue is essential for studying morphogenesis and its physical constraints. For that purpose, a possible new approach is force inference (up to a single prefactor) from cell shapes and connectivity. It is non-invasive and can provide space-tim...

In this issue of Blood, Cines and colleagues discover that red blood cells take up an unusual, and hitherto undiscovered, shape that contributes to blood clotting.

Cell death, a scheduled event during development and tissue turnover, or the ultimate consequence of toxic or pathologic insults seems to involve a relatively limited number of execution pathways. This reflects the evolution of an organized sequence of events perhaps converging onto final common pathways that are used to dispose of unwanted or injured cells. In many cases, the ordered execution...

Preservation of cell architecture under physically stressful conditions is a basic requirement for many biological processes and is critical for mechanosensory systems built to translate subtle changes in cell shape into changes in organism behaviour. A new study reveals how an extracellular protein--Spam--helps mechanosensory organs in the fruit fly to withstand the effects of the water loss t...

Abstract. We develop a novel generative model for arbitrary 2D shapes, based on multiscale deformation. We demonstrate how our model can be used to segment objects within an image by fitting a shape-sensitive contour to each object’s boundary. We demonstrate our model by performing segmentation on di↵erential interference contrast microscopy (DIC) images of yeast, where many cells possess aberr...