BECAS
VALLEJO AZAR Mariana Nahir
artículos
Título:
Description and Analysis of Spatial Patterns in Geometric Morphometric Data
Autor/es:
GONZALEZ, PAULA N.; BONFILI, NOELIA; VALLEJO AZAR, MARIANA N.; BARBEITO-ANDRES, JIMENA; BERNAL, VALERIA; PEREZ, S. IVAN
Revista:
EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
Editorial:
SPRINGER
Referencias:
Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2019
ISSN:
0071-3260
Resumen:
The development of techniques for the acquisition of high-resolution 3D images, such as computed tomography and mag-netic resonance imaging, has opened new avenues to the study of complex morphologies. Detailed descriptions of internaland external traits can be now obtained, allowing the intensive sampling of surface points. In this paper, we introduce amorphometric and statistical framework, grounded on Procrustes and Procrustes-like techniques as well as standard spatialstatistics, to explicitly describe and incorporate the spatial pattern of these surface points into the analyses. We exemplifiedthis approach by analyzing ontogenetic changes in a sample of human brain endocasts and inter-specific differences betweenprimate skulls. An intensive sampling of points on 3D surfaces was performed by automatic techniques and the morphometricvariation among specimens was measured by the residuals obtained after the alignment of points. Our results showed thatshape changes in both examples are spatially structured. Different results were attained by using methods that incorporateor not the spatial structure in the evaluation of the effect of specific biological factors on shape variation. Particularly, theseanalyses indicated that the effect of biological factors acting at local scales can be confounded with more systemic factors(by example, the effect of the diet on the facial skeleton) if the spatial structure is not taken into account. Overall, our resultssuggest that the intensive description of shape differences among structures using densely sampled points on 3D surfacescombined with spatial statistical methods can be used to explore problems not widely addressed in morphological studies.