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Exploring Shapes
ShapeSpaceExplorer is an interactive software tool for extracting, visualising, and analysing complex two-dimensional shape sequences. It is designed to study cell morphology and shape dynamics during cell migration, using a new landmark-free measure of shape difference to learn the intrinsic low-dimensional structure of shape space. Users can explore this space, visualise average shapes from selected regions, compare shape distributions across experimental conditions, and quantify the speed of shape transitions. We show that shape dynamics alone can predict changes in migration direction. Although motivated by cell biology, the framework applies broadly to two-dimensional shapes across science and engineering. Jefferyes et al. 2026
Image Credit: Samuel Jefferyes Anne Straube 2025
Citation: (2026) PLoS Computational Biology Issue Image | Vol. 22(1) February 2026. PLoS Comput Biol 22(1): ev22.i01. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pcbi.v22.i01
Published: February 10, 2026
Copyright: © 2026 . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
ShapeSpaceExplorer is an interactive software tool for extracting, visualising, and analysing complex two-dimensional shape sequences. It is designed to study cell morphology and shape dynamics during cell migration, using a new landmark-free measure of shape difference to learn the intrinsic low-dimensional structure of shape space. Users can explore this space, visualise average shapes from selected regions, compare shape distributions across experimental conditions, and quantify the speed of shape transitions. We show that shape dynamics alone can predict changes in migration direction. Although motivated by cell biology, the framework applies broadly to two-dimensional shapes across science and engineering. Jefferyes et al. 2026
Image Credit: Samuel Jefferyes Anne Straube 2025